Okay, so Twitter has been in the process of going mainstream for quite a while now, with the advent of various celebrities joining and enthusiastically advocating the network. I’d say it really started to intensify a few weeks ago when Diddy (@iamdiddy) appeared on The Ellen Show and spent a good deal of his time talking about how he uses Twitter all the time from his BlackBerry. Ellen then started tweeting as @theellenshow and even did a monlogue on her show about it. She also kept plugging her twitter profile and mentioned that she wanted to have a million followers.
Famous couple Demi Moore (@mrsktucher) and Aston Kutcher (@aplusk) have been on Twitter and singing its praises for a while now. Actually, as I’ve been consulting on social media for Earth Hour Global, I was pleased that Demi Moore tweeted out Earth Hour (@earthhour), encouraging her followers to participate just before the event in March. Just one tweet from a person with that many followers can have quite an impact in terms of raising awareness across the network.
If you’re on Twitter no doubt you’ll know (it was hard to miss) that last week Ashton Kutcher and CNN (@cnnbrk) were involved in a much hyped race to reach one million followers, which Kutcher won by a slim margin. Both got to a million, Twitter most probably got a lot of new sign-ups, everybody won.
If the fact that a Hollywood star and a major media company raced each other to get that many followers wasn’t enough to indicate that Twitter is going seriously mainstream, then Oprah (@Oprah) promptly got involved. You can’t really get much bigger than that in terms of mainstream media exposure. Although I haven’t seen it yet (but I read all about it one Twitter), I understand that Oprah did a show featuring Twitter, with Kutcher and one of the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams (@ev).
Now please correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t remember Facebook getting this much attention from very famous media identities when it hit the mainstream. Back when Second Life was the social media network the traditional media was focusing on, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have seen Larry King or Oprah in there! Twitter is exploding in popularity right now. Many tv talk shows, newspapers, magazines and radio shows seem to be talking about it. Well known media personalities seem to be joining in droves to get in on the some of the new media action.
I have to say that the rise and rise of Twitter isn’t a surprise to many who’ve been using it for a couple of years, as I have. It’s always been growing at a fast pace. The explosive rate at which it’s growing right now is simply amazing but Twitter reaching a tipping point and moving into mainstream territory isn’t surprising to me at all. It’s always been pretty simple to use, you can take it with you on your mobile, and it can be quite addictive. My 32,000+ tweets attest to that!
Twitter has had its fair share of technical problems, especially when it comes to stability, but even throughout those problems it has kept growing at a fast pace. The question that remains now is, just how big will Twitter get? Will it grow and evolve to become a multi-billion dollar company? Will it reach the heights of Facebook, with around 200 million users worldwide?
