Stephen Fry is now following me on Twitter. Big deal you say. Well Stephen Fry is now the second most popular Twitterer with over 178,000 followers trailing only President Obama in popularity. Twitter, the microblogging service, has become immensely popular of late and companies as well as individuals are establishing a presence through this medium. It now ranks no.3 in social networking behind Facebook and MySpace.
Why should you be on Twitter?
Twitter allows you to connect with and broadcast to those with similar interests to you. A domainer can build up a following of potential clients. Developers can connect with other developers and associated service providers.
People are starting to build up brands and get to know their clients in a much more rapid way than could be accomplished through traditional media. Established brands are monitoring what is said about their brand. I found Twitter so easy to use and quite addictive whereas I find Facebook to have a very confusing and illogical interface.
How to twitter
The key to Twitter is to connect with those that can help build your business. Rather than follow at random in a competition to get the most followers, a selective strategy connecting with the players in your industry and in associated industries will benefit you most. Constant self promotion will cause people to drop you and so you need to engage with some of your followers and give them some useful information or tools and also some sense of who you are.
A good way to think of Twitter: It is a somewhat formal party with many guests, some of whom share your interests. You have to sort through them in a “meet and greet” and pick those that will be good contacts to have in the future.
Fry and Laurie
“A little bit of Fry and Laurie” was an English comedy series back in the early 90s with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie which I watched religiously. Hugh Laurie you will probably better know as Dr. House in the Fox network series “House”. Stephen Fry is probably less known in the United States but is currently making guest appearances as an English psychiatrist on “Bones”, also a series on the Fox network. You might also know him from “Black Adder”, an English series sometimes shown on American TV.
This connection between the two actors led to an interesting exchange between Stephen and one of this followers on Twitter yesterday:
@stephenfry (to Stephen) if you were a patient on House, what disease/ailment/general unpleasantness would you prefer to have? DON’T SAY LUPUS!
@mykepyke (reply from Stephen) Tourette’s, you runty bastard.
Search Volume for both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie
Out of curiosity, I checked both Fry and Laurie’s search volume in Google Insights for Search to see who is more popular. One of the nice features is that you can select a geographical location to get search volume numbers.
Click any of the graphs below to see them fully.
As you can see, in worldwide search volume, Hugh Laurie leads but Stephen Fry appears to be closing the gap.
As you can see however, in the U.K., home to both of these actors, Stephen Fry generates far more search volume.
Meanwhile in America, Hugh Laurie is clearly the winner in search volume and this increase started in early 2008 which coincides with the beginning of the hit series House.
Location, location, location
This illustrates an important point about measuring search volume. Location affects search volume. If you are investing in country or region specific domains, make sure you check the search volume for your keywords in that location. It can be drastically different from one location to another. You can do this easily in Google Insights for Search.
A little bit of Fry and Laurie
I want to leave you with a short video from Fry and Laurie’s comedy series together. This is a rap comedy sketch from the early 90s. Also if you are on Twitter, don’t forget to follow Stephen Fry so you can see his daily witticisms and updates from his travels. Also you can follow me by using the Twitter button on the right side of this page.
You can also see more fun and games with Stephen Fry, a lift and Twitter
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
You can get the Fry&Laurie DVDs from Amazon. I have them – there are some classics
Hi Phil,
I have to say I love those and Black Adder. It is a particular type of humor though and not everyone gets it. Sort of like with Monty Python