How Celebrities Are Bringing Twitter to the Normal People (Guest Post from Paisano)

Twitter founder Evan Williams predicted on Charlie Rose that his service would be popular with "Normal People" in five years, but it's beginning to look like he was way off. It appears as if incredible amounts of common every day non-tech types are starting to join Twitter and the reason for this massive increase in adoption is ironic. Apparently, celebrities using Twitter has generated a great deal of interest by their fans and viewers of TV shows.

It's becoming clear that the more that celebrities talk about using Twitter, the more people become curious about this oddly named service and actually join to check it out. Some of the most well-known celebs on TV that are sharing their addiction to Twitter are Kelly Ripa, Ellen Deneres, Jimmy Fallon and American Idol host, Ryan Seacrest. By the way, Jon Stewart from The Daily Show recently went on a hilarious rank on this whole Twitter phenomenon.

The problem with all of this is the fact that Twitter is the least user-friendly service when it comes to new members. I've heard countless new members grumble and complain about the confusion they experience when they join and see nothing there. Most don't realize that they need to start adding people to follow, including their beloved celebrities.

Thankfully, Twitter has an improved search tool and a Find People area that can help a little bit. Also, their new Recommended Users tool can help newcomers find people to follow. While these certainly help to come degree, it still isn't enough to fully enhance the Twitter experience.
 

Anyway, one of these new members is my wife. She's not interested in blogging or Sillicon Valley and merely wants to follow some of her favorite celebrities on Twitter and wasn't having much luck with Twitter's built-in tools. So I went on a quest to find some cool third party tools to help her and other fans find real celebrities that use Twitter.

Twellow has been around the longest in this roundup. It's basically a yellow pages for Twitter members and includes sections for all kinds of categories much like the phone book.

WeFollow  is a new service from Kevin Rose and the folks at Digg. It looks and smells like a Twitter directory powered by hashtag categories for the type of people you want to find to follow. This includes celebrities.

Twitterists is a little different because it's not just trying to be an all-inclusive directory of all types of Twitter members but instead focuses on the famous folk that use Twitter. It allows members to add new famous twitter users much like Mahalo counts on its members for content. The service doesn't have much data at this point and the user interface can be much better.

Valebrity is the best service that I found when it comes to finding actual celebrities that use Twitter. Ok, I must confess that I did not find this service. It was my Twitter newbie wife that discovered this excellent service! Talk about humbling, here I was the big time blogger of all things new and my rookie spouse finds a service that was much better than any I could find.

Anyway, the reason why Valebrity is better than the others is because of the way that it validates each and every celebrity account on Twitter and other social networks.

There's also a handy list of "confirmed fakes" which can save you lots of time by not bothering to follow accounts that pretend to be the real deal. The list is updated all the time which makes it a useful resource to check on a regular basis.For example, Valebrity has confirmed that the Tina Fey twitter account is indeed a fake despite the fact that most people seem to believe it's really her. Tina actually commented on this by saying I don't know who it is but they're very funny.

Members can also contribute to the listings through the Contribute section. Also, celebs or their people can add them thru the Get Added section. At the bottom of every entry there's a "How we validated" link that will show you how Valebrity validated the account or confirmed that it was a fake.

Final Thoughts
Twitter is getting a ton of love these days so it doesn't really matter how people find it anymore. Whether it's for marketing your business or personal brand or simply just to follow the tweets of your favorite celebrity, the end result is that the Twitter network is growing which is only a good thing. The fact that there are already services in place like Valebrity that go to the trouble of validating the identities of certain accounts is another valuable tool for all members.

Please share some other services you like to use that help identify whom to follow on Twitter, celebrity or otherwise.

Doriano "Paisano" Carta is a writer for several blogs including ThePaisano.com and Chris Brogan's Dadomatic.com where he is also Editor-in-Chief with a staff of over 70 daddy-bloggers. He's also an I.T. Professional that is very interested in social media and Enterprise 2.0. He's a devoted husband and proud father of three wonderful children.