I hardly ever watch TV live, and today was no exception. But Mashable has a portion of today’s Twitter appearance featuring @Oprah and @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher), who reached 1 million Twitter followers, beating @CNN, so I ended up seeing the Twitter-relevant part of the show in a fairly timely fashion after all.
Here’s the video:
After the Twitter on Oprah post, Mashable posed some critical questions:
Do you think Oprah’s audience will flock to Twitter? Moreover, what will the impact of Twitter becoming so mainstream?
My comment was getting way too long, so I made a new post out of it.
Because of the way it was presented in the first of the videos from the show, I think yes, some of Oprah’s followers will flock to Twitter.
Not in a mass migration of millions, but certainly the type of thing we saw with people who joined Twitter to follow the election, and in particular, @BarackObama. What Ashton said about the ability for one person to go up against the news is appealing to a lot of people from business, personal and activist perspectives.
(And yes, only 6% of CNN’s audience uses Twitter, but that’s still about 2 million people. Four years ago, how else would any celebrity talk directly to an audience that size in their own voice, at a cost of near zero?)
Will they all expect to get a million followers? No, and they don’t need to, but the opportunity to have your voice heard, to be able to influence decision-making in an area you care about, or thought leadership on a topic you’re interested in, is a powerful thing.
The second question was even more interesting to me. What’s the impact of Twitter becoming mainstream? Of course dollar signs danced in my head. I’m a Capitalist little piggy, what do you want from me? 
Seriously speaking, once Twitter and other Social Web properties go mainstream, we lose things and we gain things, as always.
And yes, one of those things is a larger audience to indirectly (!) peddle our wares to, for the business person. It means more people to get to join our causes to the activist. It means more of our friends from the non-virtual world may be reached via Twitter, which is really powerful since we can take Twitter with us on our cell phones.
We may lose the intimacy of the Twitter community, but we’ve been losing that bit by bit since Twitter began, and people started using it for different things and in different ways than some of us were used to, particularly this last year. It’s logical – the more people there are surrounding any given thing, the less intimate it becomes. It’s possible to feel and experience intimacy as part of a crowd when you’re one of many thousands or millions, but it’s more plausible the fewer those numbers are.
The thing to remember about Twitter though, is that you’re in control of the volume of the signal and the ratio of signal to noise.
You decide who to follow.
You decide who to return-follow.
You decide how long you’re on Twitter and to what end.
Sure, you can’t force people not to follow you but you can block them. And since the people who care if and why you follow know they have to keep you interested to retain you as a subscriber, they work harder to give you what you want. In the end, that’s good for everyone, I think.
People who we believe don’t “get it” will ultimately fail at capturing our attention. We’ll be inconvenienced by their attempt to overwhelm with noise but not for long.
Besides, as long as they leave Favrd alone, we’ll all know who the cool people to follow are, right?
OMG DO THEY KNOW ABOUT FAVRD????
(Just kidding.) What do you think is going to happen? Respond below or click the retweet button, and I’ll follow the discussion back to Twitter.
