Since joining Twitter in August of 2009 — remember that show with @aplusk? — Oprah has attracted a whopping 5.4 million followers without even sending 200 tweets. That is, until Sunday night, when she kicked into overdrive to live-tweet along with a pre-recorded show on her new cable network, OWN.
Leading up to the season premiere of “Oprah Behind the Scenes,” Oprah was plugging the “tweetathon,” even tweeting out a video (right) of her on a treadmill at the gym (can’t say I’ve seen that before.) And another clip from her kitchen. Meanwhile, her staff, along with Harpo president Erik Logan and Oprah executive producer Sheri Salata huddled together in the basement of a house to tweet along on their own accounts (video).
As the show came on the air, Oprah wrote some behind-the-scenes tweets (to a behind-the-scenes show — how meta!), retweeting her staff, responding to questions and reassuring everyone that is was indeed her at the Twitter helm. Oh, and of course, reminding people to call their cable operators if they don’t have OWN on their TV sets. She was tweeting from her house, using Facetime on an iPad to keep a live stream open with her Chicago staff (photo).
As of this writing, the show is still on the air, and Oprah has sent 60 tweets — nearly one-third more than she had sent since she jumped on Twitter back in April 2009. Naturally, with that many followers, #OprahLiveTweet became a top trending topic. And it’s hard to believe that with that much social media muscle, it’s taken this long for Oprah to start plugging OWN on Twitter in earnest. But better late than never, and you can bet we’ll be seeing a lot more @Oprah tweets in the near future.