Twitter started out as a cat-blogging tool. Well, that’s not exactly what it was designed for, but the microblogging platform quickly gained the reputation of being for cat-bloggers because so many of the early users were tweeting about their cats.
Now, I’ve had a cat. They don’t do much. My dog has much more personality. So are there more than 500,000 people following a Twitter account created on behalf of Jason Scott’s pet cat Sockington, as noted by TechCrunch?
Take a stroll through Sockington’s Twitter stream–it’s all about what he does, day in and day out. And having gained such popularity, Scott has landed speaking gigs, and is even co-authoring a book with his pet cat Sockington, of course.
It looks like the fascination with cats hasn’t disappeared from Twitter. What’s interesting, however, is the return of cat-blogging to the forefront of current Twitter news and activity. I think we’re all left scratching our heads. And that includes Scott.
In three months, Sockington went from a few hundred followers to nearly 509k. Why no one really knows the answer to that, we can glean a lesson or two from Scott’s experience.
As Sockington isn’t the only cat in the house, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that Scott also has a Twitter account for his other cat Penny. Her followers rest right around 2,000, which is respectable. But it’s nowhere near half a million followers.
If you look at a few things you’ll notice a useful tip or two, based on Scott’s multiple Twitter account management. He doesn’t follow many users back, and he doesn’t really engage them in conversation. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that cats don’t talk to humans in real life, so why break character just for Twitter?
What’s notable here is the leveraging of one of Scott’s cats’ Twitter accounts for the other. Penny often uses an @reply in orer to drive traffic back to the Sockington account. This is a tactic i highly recommend if you’re managing two related Twitter accounts.
When it’s all said and done, however, I think the exploding growth of Sockington’s followers is indicative of what the mainstream really thinks about Twitter–it’s a funny site that’s full of entertainment. With celebrities taking over Twitter and the public eating it up, it’s no surprise to me that someone like Sockington can build an audience too. He faked it till he made it in a way that only a cat could do.
