#Nerd Reality: American Idol contestants affected by Twitter!!!
#TalkNerdyToMeLover’s Polly Dixon
Okay. So I love reality TV. And I’m not ashamed of it either. I’ve been hiding it for a long time but my friends totally call me out when I can easily spot and name a reality tv star faster than I can name an actual movie star. So every now and again, you may have to deal with a Reality TV posting from me. I can’t get enough. So much so that I subscribe to daily emails to keep me up to date. AND BOOM. This was in my inbox this morning
American Idol alum Corey Clark’s Twitter battle with a blogger was more entertaining than American Idol 10’s results show, even with a performance by the Black Eyed Peas and a mashup by the finalists of Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way” and “Born to be Wild” that again featured weird audio. Most interesting was that the bottom three—Karen Rodriguez, Naima Adedapo, and Haley Reinhart—are also the three least-popular finalists on Twitter, where the finalists have free reign this year.
The number of followers each American Idol finalist has on Twitter has correlated with the contestants’ lack of popularity: The bottom three both this week and last week are those with the fewest number of followers, though it’s not necessarily an accurate predictor of who will go home, as the person with the fewest number of followers, Naima Adedapo, was safe, as Karen Rodriguez, who has just over a thousand more followers, went home.
That was true last week, too, when The Wrap compiled a similar list as of Monday. While it’s no surprise that people popular online are also popular among voters and vice-versa, I think we can safely say that right now, social media popularity is a better predictor of a contestant’s safety or not than DialIdol’s predictions, which said Naima was certainly safe and said that the most likely bottom three were Paul, Casey, and Karen. Then again, DialIdol’s predictions were that seven people, a majority, “May be voted off or safe — it’s just too close to call.” Not much of a predictor at all.
I compiled this list of the American Idol top 13’s followers at 9 p.m. ET, immediately following the results show, and I’m sure it has changed since then, just as it surely did since the performance show:
- Casey Abrams: 33,758
- Scotty McCreery: 33,530
- Paul McDonald: 27,620
- Pia Toscano: 23,041
- Lauren Alaina: 23,905
- Thia Megia: 22,956
- James Durbin: 21,924
- Stefano Langone: 19,941
- Jacob Lusk: 13,672
- Haley Reinhart: 11,928 (bottom three)
- Karen Rodriguez: 11,874 (voted off second)
- Naima Adedapo: 10,778 (bottom three)
- Ashton Jones: 6,899 (voted off first)