Oprah Show Boosts Twitter Taffic By 40 Percent

Oprah Winfrey has come a long, long way from being an unknown actress in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 feature film “The Color Purple” to exerting worldwide influence on such things as book sales, education, health care, self-help—even Presidential elections.

Winfrey’s support of Barack Obama for president in 2008 may well have delivered enough votes to decide the election for him, some political analysts have said.

Recently she used her television show and Web site to examine the Twitter phenomenon, and of course it boosted the popularity of the 75-person, San Francisco-based IT company in incredible fashion.

On 17 April, the super-popular talk show hostess devoted her entire show to a discussion and demonstration of the instant-message social networking site. Afterward, traffic to Twitter shot up a whopping 43 percent, market tracker Hitwise reported.

On her Chicago-base show, Winfrey synched her laptop to an on-screen monitor and “tweeted” for the first time with actor-producer Ashton Kutcher at his office in Southern California. Kutcher, who also was talking onscreen to Winfrey on a Skype video hookup, had just attracted his 1 millionth “follower” on Twitter in an well-publicized race to reach that plateau before CNN’s Twitter site did.

Later, on Larry King’s nightly CNN talk show, Kutcher was congratulated by CNN news hound Anderson Cooper for the Twitter accomplishment.

Winfrey’s show is syndicated everywhere English is spoken, and CNN is worldwide, so Twitter had the public relations day of its short life that day.

Also on 17 April , 37 percent of hits to Twitter.com were by new visitors, Hitwise said. Facebook’s ratio of new visitors in March was a mere 8 percent, the service reported.

Finally, Hitwise said that “Oprah” was the No. 7 search-for term of the day and “Oprah Twitter,” had come out of nowhere to be No. 35.

Never underestimate the power of a popular media celebrity.

Chris Preimesberger

Editor of eWEEK and repository of knowledge on storage, amongst other things

Recent Posts

Microsoft Faces EU Antitrust Charges Over Teams

Microsoft faces formal EU antitrust charges over videoconferencing app Teams after concessions to European Commission…

10 hours ago

New Jersey Apple Store Workers Vote Against Unionisation

Workers at New Jersey Apple Store vote against joining union as post-pandemic labour drive at…

10 hours ago

OpenAI Adds Voice Conversation To New ChatGPT Model

Microsoft-backed OpenAI releases new AI model GPT-4o with voice conversation capability, desktop app and updated…

11 hours ago

SpaceX Prepares Fourth Starship Test

SpaceX prepares fourth Starship test flight, launches more Starlink satellites, shows EVA suit for commercial…

11 hours ago

SpaceX Contractors In Texas Remain Unpaid

SpaceX and its contractors have left construction bills unpaid in Texas, angering many smaller suppliers,…

12 hours ago

US To Make 30 Percent Of Advanced Chips By 2032

US to triple domestic chipmaking capacity and control 30 percent of advanced chips by 2032…

12 hours ago