If Even The Terminator Tweets, Shouldn’t You?

04/08/09

By Adam Parker

The Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been tweeting since the early part of 2008. Not, of course, to tell us that the world will end in 2029, but in his role as Governor of California. What can we learn about how to use Twitter from Arnie?

A review of his tweets shows that there has been quite a change in both their frequency and nature in the last few months. The frequency has increased around fourfold and the nature of what is being said has become more personal and more of a dialogue. These changes coincide...

...with the fact that a lot of his tweets now come from the Blackberry Twitter application, Twitterberry, which is used by people, including me, to tweet while on the move. All these changes suggest that perhaps Mr Schwarzenegger has become more actively involved with the process than he may have been at the start.

He is also using Twitter (@Schwarzenegger) to reach out to his constituents and even source ideas to solve their budgetary issues with one person suggesting that when the State disposed of cars to save money the Governor should sign the cars to increase their value. He’s uploading images with TwitPic and has even just recorded a video of himself and uploaded to his Twitter stream. (STOP PRESS unfortunately brandishing the knife at the beginning has lead to a little bad publicity for him! See Twitt-iquette: Top 10 Twitter Faux Pas)

The result has been a tenfold increase in his number of followers from around 70,000 in early May 2009 to over 700,000 as of 23 July 2009. You might think this was just due to increased interest in Twitter but this comparison graph with our own Stephen Fry shows that this doesn’t... continued on page two >

 

 

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