Tweet Me Bollywood

Twitter is a phenomenon that people are yet to understand. The simplicity of it just baffles one’s mind. However, to bring to full potential, you really need to see it in use by a celebrity. In my case, I had almost always wondered if Bollywood could ever present itself as joining the bandwagon, let alone figure out a way to publicise using the technology.

I was following up Lisa Ray, an established Bollywood actress, on her personal blog, she’d tagged as the Yellow Diary blog. The post that really got my attention was where she came out as saying that she had an incurable form of Multiple Myeloma cancer. I was hooked to the blog after that and wanted to know more of what going on in her life. Interestingly enough I ended up looking for answers on Twitter and there she was on Twitter as well. That whole day, I searched through the Twitter directory to search for who else is online and astonishingly enough almost every Bollywood star was up there (with an exception of a few).

Bollywood is finally grasping the mammoth dynamics of using Twitter

Relationship Dynamics

Once you end up on a Twitter page for a certain star, it’s just as easy to see who the star has on speed dial. Check whom the star is following and an even bigger picture of inner Bollywood relationship dynamics comes into play. Recently enough, many a journalist have ventured into these Twitter profiles and assembled presumptions of “who is related to who” purely following the followers.

Putting Twitter to good use

Actress Gul Panag wearing a t-shirt saying, "Have you been Gul'd yet?" and her Twitter profile address follows.

Actress Lara Dutta fell ill, director Mahesh Bhatt came out as quite a poetic personality and playback singer Shreya Ghoshal thinks the movie “Day After Tomorrow” is scary. These tweets might be personal but they aren’t worth the time for these Bollywood powerhouses. Half the world is following them, these stars still haven’t figured out how to bank on the benefits of using real-time social networking. However, there seems to be a few individual that seem to have grasped the true potential of Twitter.

One worth mentioning is actress Gul Panag. Recently, she was asked by the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week to be their tweeting brand ambassador, so to say. She was asked to tweet a minute-by-minute description of what happened in the fashion shows that she was then invited to and posted pictures from her mobile phone’s built-in camera. This personal approach to interactions with a worldwide audience and fashion enthusiasts not only brought the recent fashion events into a spotlight but also gave a boost to the actresses followers. Overnight she had amassed followers in the tens of thousands.

Find your favourite Bollywood star on Twitter

Here are some pointers to stars and banners that you might want to follow.

• Dino Morea
• Lisa Rani Ray
• Lara Dutta
• Emraan Hashmi
• Konkona Sen Sharma
• Shreya Ghoshal
• Yash Raj Films
• Mallika Sherawat
• Mahesh Bhatt
• Gul Panag
• Tarun Mansukhani
• Pooja Bhatt
• Priyanka Chopra
• Uday Chopra
• Karan Johar
• Mandira Bedi
• Imran Khan
• Anushka Manchanda
• Sonam Kapoor