Buying celebrities on Twitter: Great strategy or a waste of money?

The advent of social media and online social networks has drastically changed the way we communicate. Not only are we able to consume information about any topic from anywhere in the world, but now anyone with any idea or message can make their message go viral across the world.

But if it’s really true that anyone can reach thousands of people, how does one achieve this goal? Popular logic dictates that the answer is simple: Get enough people to follow you on Twitter!

We see it everywhere; a simple Google search for “How to get more Twitter followers?” will return countless ways in which you can increase your Twitter audience. Evidently, one simple way to get more followers is to buy them. Some websites offer 1 000 followers for just US$24.97, 2 000 followers for US$44.97, or even 5 000 followers for US$114.97.

Another way of obtaining followers is to get someone with many followers to follow you or retweet you. But how can you get someone famous to do this for you? Easy! You can pay for it.

TwitChange, a fundraiser to raise money for a nonprofit group that helps children in Haiti, raised thousands of dollars with the help of over 150 celebrities. Through eBay auctions people could bid to be retweeted, mentioned, or followed by their favorite celebrity. The auctions started on Wednesday September 15th and ran for 10 days. Take a look at the promo video.

There were some very expensive auctions for celebrities like Ultimate Fighting Champion Dana White whose auction ended at US$15 600 after 86 bids and actor Zachary Levi at US$14 900 after 135 bids. There were also cheaper ones such as George Lopez at US$38 after 19 bids and Snoop Dogg at US$67.55 after 7 bids.

TwitChange was a very clever idea for a great cause. The organisers knew that people would be willing to pay to boost the popularity of their Twitter accounts through celebrities. But does being followed, mentioned, or retweeted by a celebrity really give your Twitter account significantly more popularity or influence? Some studies suggest that this is not the case.

Yahoo’s principal research scientist Duncan Watts studied information cascades on Twitter and his findings suggest that tweets are most often ignored, including tweets from celebrities. Watt’s findings also show that if a company is thinking about investing US$10 000 on word of mouth advertising on Twitter, it may be a better idea to pay $1 to 10 000 average Joes to tweet about their products than paying US$10 000 to a single celebrity.

Another study from Bernardo Huberman’s Social Computing Lab at HP labs suggests that when it comes to influence, popularity may have very little impact. The study shows that a meaningful measure of influence on Twitter is almost unrelated to the number of followers. It goes further to suggest that, just because an account has millions of followers, it doesn’t mean that its tweets will get retweeted or that the URLs tweeted by the account will get much traffic. In other words, there is a weak link between popularity and influence.

The lesson here is that Twitter users are interested in valuable content and not in what celebrities had for breakfast. The best strategy to increase your popularity on Twitter is to focus on the quality of your tweets and not on who or how many people follow you, who mentions you, or who retweets you.

These findings generate doubts about the wisdom behind sponsored tweets and trending topics. If Twitter users do not necessarily pay attention to what celebrities have to say, will they attend to content that someone paid to promote on Twitter?

For more analyses by Daniel Romero’s read “The 100 most influential news media Twitter accounts”