Zwanziger #4

Blog #4

Ariana Grande is possibly my most favorite celebrity ever. I am in love with the woman. While I do not personally know Ariana Grande, I do actively follow her on her social media, which is mostly why I love her so much. Not only do I think that she is incredibly talented, but I also think that she has a great social media presence as well. Ariana Grande primarily uses Twitter but is also incredibly popular on Instagram as well. While most celebrities only use their social medias to try and promote themselves or their products, she uses it in ways that most regular people do too. While she does share some snippets of her upcoming work on her social media, she mainly is using it to interact and communicate with her followers. Because of this, she has built and incredible community of fans who feel like they know her, and in turn want to support her even more.  

As of this past week, Ariana Grande just hit 177 million followers on Instagram, making her the most followed woman on the platform. While a lot of people who have a similar follower account on Instagram take and post pictures almost daily, Ariana is a little different. Ariana posts pictures every so often, and most of them are pictures of her family or her dogs. She rarely ever posts pictures of herself that were obviously taken with the intention of posting on social media and has even said many times that she dislikes having her picture taken. Instead, she uses her social media as a lot of us who don’t have that many followers do. She posts a lot of pictures of her parents, friends, and pets, and if she does post a picture of herself its either a low-quality selfie or a picture of her performing on stage. This makes her seem extremely authentic and like she is just a regular person.

Quite possibly the main reason that made me fall in love with Ariana Grande is her presence on Twitter. Ariana is extremely active on twitter and is constantly talking and joking with her fans. In fact, she often interacts with her fans as if they are her friends and admits to knowing a lot of her fans because of their handles on Twitter. As we know, there are a lot of different “communities” on Twitter, and one of them is known as “stan Twitter”. Stan Twitter is essentially people who make fan accounts for their favorite celebrities and post about what they are doing. The term “stan” originates from the Eminem song “Stan”, which is about a man who is such a big fam of Eminem that he is constantly writing him letters and telling him about his struggles through his life. The term mainly means that someone is a huge fan of someone. Yes, I am an Ariana Grande stan. No, I do not have a stan account. Yet. Not only that, but stan Twitter also has their own language/slang that they are constantly using to try and get their points across. While a lot of celebrities are aware of their fan accounts on social media, not a lot of celebrities interact with them. Ariana Grande takes it a step further and is almost always communicating with her stans on Twitter. And to make it better she also uses stan slang.   

 

To me, I think that Ariana Grande uses her social media accounts in ways that not a lot of celebrities have before. I think that by her using her social media in these ways she has created a sense of community for her fans and has probably made a lot of people bigger fans than they would have been without her social media accounts. As you can probably tell I am a “fangirl” for her, but I honestly think that more celebrities should follow in her footsteps of how she interacts with her fans. I think that if more celebrities interacted with their fans on social media the way that Ariana Grande does, they may have more fans. A lot of celebrities tell their fans that they love them and care for them, but not a lot of them show it. While it may seem dumb, this is a great way to interact with their supporters and show that they want to know more about their lives and what they’re doing. This obviously would not be that successful for a company, but for a celebrity or internet celebrity it might help a lot with how many people support them.