Bill Opens Twitter Flood Gates
January 20th, 2010 by Rob Brown
Tweeting just three times in 24 hours @BillGates has amassed over 165,000 followers on his twitter account. Twitter Counter is predicting that by tomorrow he will have reached the quarter million mark.
The account was set up last June but was dormant until yesterday when the Microsoft supremo broke his silence with the words ‘Hello World’. He also mentioned that he would be publishing a letter on behalf of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a few days. The missive from his philanthropic organisation will land on the 25th January. We can only guess at the content but Gates has also tweeted his concerns about the situation in Haiti.
The Hollywood celeb Ashton Kutcher was the first to break the million follower mark on twitter. He took three months and some active campaigning to hit that figure. It looks like Bill Gates will reach a million within a week or so. This puts paid to any notion that twitter can’t be a broadcast channel for certain individuals and organisations.
Some quick twitter facts about Bill Gates first day of tweeting:
- He is using twitter.com rather than a twitter client
- No mobile posts as yet (not too suprsing from the founder of Microsoft)
- He has tweeted 5 times but two of these have been retweets (using the native function on twitter)
- He has already been ‘listed’ over 5000 times
- He has @posted twice - both to US celebs
- The first person he followed was New York Times columnist Nick Kristof
January 25th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
Gates seems intent on keeping the number of people he follows low. Only 42 at the time of my checking compared to the 340K who are following him. And only a handful of those 42 are individuals. Surely one of the web’s most exclusive new clubs?