14 DAY TRIAL // Most celebrities are now on Twitter and on other social networks too, but there are also some of them who are serial tweeters – like Britney Spears, Stephen Fry or Sarah Brown, so an entire study from the University of Leicester will be dedicated to them and all the social media intense users.
This new study will be led by Dr Ruth Page, of the School of English, who is writing a book on this topic and is analyzing the celebrities' way of using Twitter and building their online character.
Dr Page said that “telling stories is a human impulse, [and] through social media, millions of people are telling their own stories every day in status updates, tweets and blogs.
“Social media is a phenomenon of our time so it is important to make sense of it.
“It magnifies social interactions and can tell us a lot about ourselves and how our relationships function.”
For her research, she is focusing on 15,000 tweets belonging to the 30, most popular celebrity tweeters, and study the way that they engage with their “followers”.
The study itself is part of a bigger series which investigates the way that stories are being told, by using today's several social media like discussion forums, blogs, Facebook and Twitter, of course.
According to the first linguistic analysis, there seem to already be some mechanisms that celebrities use on Twitter, to give their audience the feeling of proximity.
They use many informal feature in their tweets, like Lilly Allen who uses taboo language and jokes, Amanda Holden who gives away many details of her domestic home life, or Jamie Oliver, who always speaks well of other chefs.
The researcher says that this method gives fans their VIP access to the celebrities, but also increases the professional status of the star, AlphaGalileo reports.
Ruth Page also explains that there is a big difference between Facebook and Twitter, even though more people associate the two.
She said that “whereas the former is used as a private social network, the latter is essentially an online environment for public news dissemination.”