Justin Bieber on Twitter

, Justin Bieber's Twitter account (@justinbieber) is the second most popular official celebrity Twitter account, behind that of Lady Gaga. Justin Bieber describes himself as a Twitter addict. He uses hashtags when tweeting and discusses a wide variety of topics. By September 2010, his fans accounted for three percent of all Twitter traffic, amounting to 180 million total page views a month. He was frequently a trending topic on the service. Bieber was an early adopter of Instagram, tweeting about it in July 2011. Ashton Kutcher first learned of Bieber through Twitter. Charlie Sheen accidentally shared his phone number with the world while trying to direct message to Bieber. His fans have engaged in an effort to unseat Lady Gaga as the site's most popular celebrity. He announces his tours, concerts and songs on Twitter, where his fans can usually make topics about him trending.

Introduction
Justin Bieber's official Twitter account is @justinbieber. Bieber has been called a Twitter addict,  joining on 28 March 2009, a month after his mother. His early tweets were on topics like record release announcements, collaborations he was involved with, and topping music charts. His decisions regarding which followers to retweet is, in his words, "kind of, like, it's random". Most fans respond favorably when he retweets their messages. Bieber's manager is also on Twitter and actively engages people there. Bieber utilizes the tag #RandomTwitterHour in order to let his fans know he is making random comments. For a brief time in April 2011, Bieber quit Twitter. When Bieber makes a joke on Twitter about what he is doing, it often gets mistaken by people as the truth and ends up reported as true elsewhere. Author Mike Skinner in The Story of the Streets says based on the Twitter metrics, "all roads lead to Justin Bieber."

Bieber comments on a broad range of subjects on Twitter, including the Arab Spring's Egyptian uprising that led the country's leaders to shut down the Internet, and his own appearances on television shows. He also tweeted about the Kony 2012 campaign in March and April 2012, and the death of Whitney Houston in February 2012. Less controversially, he posts about his travels, including an April 2010 trip to New Zealand where he went bungee jumping. For his 18th birthday, he requested his followers donate $18 to charity: water. Bieber's tweets sometimes include spiritual references and how he can "pay it forward" in terms of his good fortune. One example of this is a tweet from October 2009, when he tweeted "If you could give to any charity, what would it be?" Bieber tweeted against texting and driving in July 2011. He also tweets messages to fans, asking them to behave and make his appearances safe and fun. Bieber actively acknowledges his fans on Twitter,  following back over 122,987  which allows fans to send him direct messages. A return follow is something highly coveted by his fans, with many fans knowing precisely when his account followed back. Bieber actively acknowledges his fans in other ways beyond following.

In April 2010, while travelling in New Zealand, he posted "... need to shoutout my New Zealand fans...I'm coming to see u guys next week!! I'm trying to play rugby with the All Blacks". Also in April 2010, he thanked his followers for helping to make him a trending topic on Twitter. After hitting the 6 million Twitter follower total in November 2010, Bieber gave a shout out to his followers, saying "6 MILLION OF THE GREATEST FANS ON EARTH ON TWITTER!!!! THANK U" Following this news being picked up, #6millionbeliebers became a trending topic on Twitter. When he passed the 11 million follower count in July 2011, he tweeted "#11MillionBeliebers! I LOVE YOU ALL!! THANK YOU....tonight was already a fun great night and now it is even better. THANK U THANK U THANK U."

In December 2011, following Drew's dismissal from The X Factor, Bieber commented on Twitter to urge her to keep her spirits up, saying "@drewryniewicz keep your head up. I lost my first competition too. this is just the beginning for u. never say never. best wishes." Drew was selected for the show in part because of her performance of a Bieber song.

Technology, marketing and the media
Bieber's popularity on the site made him the unofficial "King of Twitter". By September 2010, Bieber accounted for three percent of all Twitter related traffic. Dustin Curtis, a Twitter employee, said that "racks of servers are dedicated" to Bieber. This resulted in over 180 million page views for Justin Bieber-related material each month. For the year 2010, Stephen Colbert, Drake and Justin Bieber were the three most re-tweeted celebrities on the site. Bieber was frequently a trending topic on Twitter when the feature first launched because his fans frequently discussed him on the network. Immediately following Bieber updating, sixty responses to him are posted a second. As a result, he was named the top trending star on Twitter in 2010. Twitter reconfigured their algorithm to make the topics more news based instead of topics that were frequently discussed; the company said this was unrelated to Bieber's continual presence on the list. Despite these reassurances, some Bieber fans were upset with Twitter and tried to manipulate the new algorithm by getting related words and misspellings connected to Bieber to trend including the words Twieber and Jieber. He was regularly trending in April 2010. Bieber-related topics would continue to trend on Twitter, including MSG-ANNIVERSARY, Beliebers Love Jelena, and "Happy Birthday Pattie".

In March 2011 the Bieber topic trended alongside the iPad and Charlie Sheen. His continued popularity can still be seen if a developer looks at the 50 most frequent tokens on Twitter. The Ad Age cover the Bieber trending phenomenon in an article titled "On Twitter, Justin Bieber Is More Popular Than Jesus". , Klout gave Bieber's Twitter account a score of 100. In August 2010, his score was 99, with only Conan O'Brien and Lebron James having a score that high at the time. He was ahead of Ashton Kutcher who had a score of 97 and Sean Combs who had a score of 94. Google search results for Bieber will pull in Bieber-related Tweets in a search results section called "Latest News".

Bieber used the popular Twitter and Facebook photo sharing application Instagram in July 2011. Bieber's use of Instagram helped drive a lot of traffic to the site. Bieber's tweets can drive online sales. SeatGeek saw increases after tweets, more when mentions by Bieber appeared to be organic in nature. Bieber was in an advertisement for Best Buy at a time when he had around 8 million followers. Following this advertising airing, he tweeted about the advertisement to his followers. Black Entertainment Television worked with Bieber and six other celebrities to promote an awards event airing on their channel. They arranged it so Bieber and the others would leverage their popularity to bring additional attention to the event, by amongst other things, live tweeting the event. Spotify leveraged Bieber's brand by getting Bieber to offer invites to his followers. On the other hand, Justin Bieber: Oh Boy! suggests fan access to Bieber on Twitter may reduce fans' willingness to buy things like magazines where Bieber is on the cover. On 16 March 2012, Bieber asked his Twitter followers for help with cover art for his next album, selecting between two images. Votes would be made by fans by using different hash tags for each image, #JBboyfriend1 and #JBboyfriend2.

The size of Bieber and Lady Gaga's follower bases is cited as a reason why marketers should pay attention to Twitter. They have the ability to reach millions of people with a single tweet. The size of his following is used as a barometers of success for artists like Conor Maynard. Bieber and Lady Gaga are cited as examples for positive authentic Twitter interaction, which their fans appreciate, although a 2011 survey found that 8.3% of tweets mentioning "bieber" were semi-automated and probably Twitter related spam. Paramount Pictures utilised Twitter and the hashtag #NSNweekend to market Justin Bieber: Never Say Never to his fans on Twitter. His best friend wore a shirt promoting Bieber's Twitter account in his music video, "One Time." Bieber's successful usage of social media and specifically Twitter is something potential songwriters and performers are encouraged to model as a way to get discovered. Online video news sites like MSNBC look at various online metrics including social media mentions on sites like Twitter, but they discourage people from comparing their own metrics to people like Bieber as these are unrealistic for most people as a measure of success. Research done about Twitter and the 2011 Egyptian revolution includes Bieber as he made tweets about the topic at a time when he had roughly 8 million followers. His multiple tweets resulted in 32,000 responses each, which made Bieber's Twitter account one of the single largest nodes for discussion about the uprising. }

Followers and fans
Bieber has one of the largest celebrity Twitter follower counts on the service, and is second only to Lady Gaga,  though at one point Britney Spears was more popular than him. He had a number of fans on the service by September 2009. In April 2010, he had 2 million followers. On 28 April 2010, he had 2.1 million followers; in September 2010, over 5 million; and by November 2010, he had 6 million followers, trailing Lady Gaga by a million. That month, he was averaging 24,000 new followers a day. In February 2011, he had 7 million followers, and by 1 April 2011, Bieber had 8,500,907 followers, ahead of third place Britney Spears who had 7,289,958 followers. He cracked the 9 million mark by 24 April 2011. By early July, 11 million followers, roughly a million less than Lady Gaga. His 14 July total was 11,019,472 followers. In November 2011, he had 15 million followers. On 29 January 2012, he had 16.5 million followers, having acquired a lot of new followers at the start of the year. In mid-March 2012, he had 18 million followers. On 7 March he had 18.1 million followers. By late March 2012, he had nearly 19 million followers. On 3 April 2012, he had 18.5 million followers, fewer than the 41.5 million fans he had on Facebook on the same date. By mid-April 2012, he had over 20 million followers. In April 2012, he gained one new follower every other second. On 31 May 2012, when Lady Gaga hit the 25 million follower mark, Bieber had 22.9 million followers. On 27 June 2012, he reached 24 million followers.

Some of the earliest Bieber related content on Twitter appeared in 2007. One example of this content was posted that year by a user named Scooter sharing a video of Ne-Yo's "So Sick" being sung by Bieber. Fans of the musician use Twitter to keep up with his latest activities, and express their general love of him, with some Tweets being as young as thirteen years old.

Bieber fans use the service to try to get his attention, including friends of 20-year old Hélène Campbell who successfully got Bieber to tweet about Campbell's need for an organ transplant. Bieber's tweet said "@alungstory I got the word . . . You have amazing strength. I got u. #BeAnOrganDonor." Trillium, who normally gets an average of 50 registrations a day for organ donation, had 1,500 in response to the tweet.

Bieber Twitter followers frequently offer their support on Twitter. Following an incident in Israel when Bieber was surrounded by paparazzi while trying to visit a church and after having vented about it on Twitter, thousands of fans made comments on Twitter, offering him positive advice and in a few cases making abusive comments about the photographers. They also offered support to him after he was attacked at Macy's.

For some people, including Ashton Kutcher, Twitter was their first introduction to Bieber; eventually, Bieber and Kutcher worked together on pranks. Celebrities like Joel Madden have been known to tweet about meeting Bieber or seeing him live and in concert. Boxer David Haye tweeted about having a training session with Bieber. During Bieber's November 2011 live performance on The Today Show, there were more than 50,000 mentions connecting the show and Bieber on Twitter every single hour it aired as the performance aired in different time zones. While the movie Justin Bieber: Never Say Never had an Internet Movie Database (IMDB) score of 1.1 out of a possible 10, people still wrote 25,000 tweets about the movie. This compares to Inception, which earned an IMBD score of 8.9 and 167,000 tweets were made about it.

In March 2012, Bieber fans wanted to unseat Lady Gaga as the most popular celebrity on Twitter. The fan campaign is described by Reuters as a "jihad against Gaga's Twitter dominance." Bieber's fans managed to make #OperationUnfollowGaga a trending topic on Twitter by mid-March. The campaign annoyed some Bieber fans and was not successful. Neither Bieber nor Lady Gaga discussed their mutual fanbase's campaigns on Twitter.

Twitter mishaps and controversy
Bieber, along with other celebrities, has been the subject of false reports of his death on Twitter,   including reports in 2011 that he felt obliged to respond to on Twitter to inform his followers he was alive. One false report of his death that Twitter users initially believed became a trending topic on the site. After he made a guest appearance on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, actress Marg Helgenberger criticised his on-set behaviour on a French radio program. When news of this reached Bieber, he commented on Twitter to say "I know who i am and sometimes people r just going 2 say what they want. Keep ur head up and be the man ur mama raised. #killemwithkindness."

Actor Charlie Sheen attempted to send a direct message to Bieber, but failed and inadvertently revealed Sheen's number to all Sheen's Twitter followers in December 2011. As a result, Sheen needed to get a new number. Sheen's tweet was named as one of the top ten Twitter faux pas of 2011 by The Daily Telegraph. Bieber fans were unhappy with comedian Jimmy Kimmel in January 2012 because Kimmel had copied Bieber's profile to his own. Some demanded Kimmel admit he did this and remove the profile. A few fans even went to far as to issue death threats to Kimmel. Kimmel responded to at least one fan, and Bieber also weighed in the situation to let his followers know he was in on the joke. Bieber made a tweet in March 2012 that said "call me now" and included a phone number for a Texas couple. He subsequently deleted the tweet, but it was viewed by his many followers in the interim. The couple were bombarded with phone calls, and threatened to sue Bieber for having made the tweet.

In October 2011, Mariah Yeater falsely accused Bieber of impregnating her, claiming he fathered her child. Bieber largely remained silent on the topic until he mentioned it on Twitter on 21 April 2012, saying "Dear mariah yeeter...we have never met...so from the heart i just wanted to say..." followed by a link to a YouTube video of Borat repeatedly saying “You will never get this”. Fans discussed Bieber's tweet and offered him their support. He responded by re-tweeting one of their tweets. His prior comment on the topic was in early November, when he said "All the rumors...the gossip....Im gonna focus on the positives....the music." Bieber's fans have been abusive towards Yeater for a while as a result of the controversy. The discussion of Yeater on Twitter was large, and trended on Twitter for 12 hours at one point. Bieber fans threatened Yeater in response to the allegations. A riot started in November 2009 related to Justin Bieber, which resulted in James A. Roppo, attached to Bieber's record company, being arrested because he failed to post an update to Twitter to keep the 3,000 Bieber fans who came to a mall informed that a Bieber appearance was canceled. Bieber fans have tweeted death threats to Bieber's girlfriend, Selena Gomez. Bieber fans on Twitter have also issued death threats to Kim Kardashian. This happened in 2010 after the pair met at a White House related event. The negative attention resulted in Kardashian requesting Bieber intervene with his fans.