How celebrities use social media in 2017

~With the rise and power of social media in the last decade, anyone can become a content creator in his own world. Everything started in 2004 when a young Harvard student was experimenting with what we call social media. Taking a look back at "thefacebook" Mark Zuckerberg created in 2004, when its main purpose was to connect Harvard students to one another, and billions of people Facebook connects today all over the world, proves that in only a decade social media have come a long way. (Baron, 2010)

Few words about social media

As Facebook continues to lead, other social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are also growing fast in popularity. By the fourth quarter of 2015,1.59 billion Internet users were on Facebook, and today, the average user owns 5.54 social media accounts. In September 2015, Instagram passed the 400 million user mark. In the second quarter of 2016, LinkedIn reported that its network had grown to 450 million users, and as of September 2016 Twitter had 313 million users. (SIMKINS, J., 2016, p. 1).

Celebrities and Social Media

Social media is an extraordinary tool, especially between celebrities, offering them a way to communicate with their fans. Celebrities have always been in the spotlight, especially with the invention of magazines, radio, and television. People have always been interested in their stories. In modern culture, celebrities are playing an ever greater role in our society, and social media is a very beneficial tool for those who understand how to use it properly.

Today, most celebrities do have a social media presence, however, not all of them use it right. Social media serves as a great tool for celebrities to build up their brands, to keep their name in the public eye, and to be in touch with their fans. Most of them do know how to take advantage of this amazing resource, by posting consistently the right type of messages, through the right channels, with the right frequency. For all these, though, one needs a good understanding of his or her audience. In order to deliver the right message to their loyal fans, celebrities have to listen to them and keep an open communication with them. Sometimes fans can get angry, and conflicts arose. But in the end, in this industry, every publicity is considered good publicity, and the celebrity remains in the public eye anyways.

Lady Gaga, the Megastar

Lady Gaga during Super Bowl, Sunday, February 5, 2017. (Foto AP/Darron Cummings);

Lady Gaga dominates social media world, with her 66 million followers on Twitter, 62 million on Facebook, and 22 million loyal followers on Instagram. She has started her career back in New York in early 2000’s as a member of a rock band, and in just a few years her name was well known around the world, due to her fantastic voice, tremendous originality, and very good PR. Lady Gaga is one of those celebrities very much involved in managing her own social media accounts, with very little help from her PR teams. She knows her fans better than anyone else, showing them a lot of respect and appreciation by following many of them, re-tweeting their posts, and mentioning their names in her consistent tweets. Meanwhile, she masters the art of keeping them on the edge with hints and teasers about her upcoming plans, her upcoming albums, tours, and also about her life. Social media is an amazing tool for self-promotion, and Lady Gaga knows very well how to use this to her own advantage. 2 of her most recent performances in 2017, The Super Bowl and The Grammys are just another proof that Lady Gaga burns out social media with each of her appearances. According to Fox media, the word Gaga received 41.000 tweets per minute during the Super Bowl, and 396.000 people were mentioning Gaga per minute on Facebook. (Forbes, 2017).

Image Source: Getty / Jon Kopaloff

Nobody does authentic videos like Lady Gaga. Did you know she tailors her videos specifically for YouTube listeners with longer versions and the whole story lines? She knows her fans very well, and she offers them exactly what they want.