Amitabh Bachchan Followers

Looking for a job? Include your online presence in your resume, such as number of followers and page views. Oops! They change by the minute, or don't change at all. These are facts of life. Make that online life.

Are followers important in what you do online? You bet. Here are Amitabh Bachchan's latest Twitter stats. Date: 8 August, 2015. Time: 8.27 a.m. Followers: 16.3m. He has clocked in 43.6k tweets to date.

That was then. Today, 29 February in a leap year, his Twitter followers are recorded as 19.6 million.

Movie and sports stars have more followers than governments. I thought about that when i saw Amitabh Bachchan’s 30 March, 2015 tweet. He shared interesting stats about his followers.

You know who Amitabh Bachchan is, if you love movies, watch Indian television shows such as KBC and you love reading blogs. He is an Indian actor, producer, film historian, conservationist, activist for the rights of girl children and cricket lover. He also happens to be Abhishek Bachchan’s father, and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s father-in-law.

Senior Bachchan (his son is Junior Bachchan) has more than 14 million Twitter followers. You can imagine his dilemma. Should he follow all of them? This is a question most people ask themselves online.

Based on the ‘you scratch my back and I scratch yours concept,’ he should follow the 14 million on Twitter, but the real world doesn’t work like that. One good reason why people do not reciprocate the following, is self interest.

We are online because of personal agendas and do not follow people who cannot help us further those agendas. The internet is also a marketplace. We are always selling something.

Amit ji, as he is fondly called in India and abroad, is an open book because he shares his whole life with his fans. His fame pre-dates the internet. Fans go to his house every Sunday to see him. He goes out and waves at them if he is home.

He writes about the Sunday crowds quite often. Apparently, he was injured during the shooting of Coolie, one of his classic movies. Fans were so concerned they congregated at his house every Sunday to get the latest news. That tradition still lives 33 years later with its own Facebook page.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhHtYF91YDw

Amitabh Bachchan is a famous citizen of India but he is also a student of the world. He travels a lot, promoting Indian cinema, taking part in ceremonial Olympic events and promoting his father’s writing.

He is not in the room to answer questions why he follows the 900 plus people so, we shall do some guesswork on just ten reasons. You might have more.

The last item in the table above is a good example of how following someone is subjective. It is not, and can never be a science, like the sun keeps us warm and stars shine only at night.

If it was a science, I would know why Amitabh Bachchan also follows @9ja, a Twitter handle on Nigerian politics and general life in Nigeria (locals call their country Naija).

I enjoy the jokes because I am a notorious movie butterfly that eavesdrops on world movies. Nigerian movies in English, Yoruba and Igbo give me some idea about life in that country.

Amitabh Bachchan is the only person who can tell us why @9ja is one of the humour accounts he is following. Being followed by Big B is like finding a platinum mine. No, not gold. That is old money. It is such a big deal, people include it in their Twitter accounts.

I thought the whole ‘follow’ and ‘following’ thing was based on interest. I thought I could share the little I know with other people and I could learn from them, even if I disagree.

I thought that it is in my best interest to follow someone who has made a comment on my status or account. Pure appreciation! They could have spent that ten minutes on the millions of blogs and YouTube videos at their fingertips.

Nada! Wrong! Put interest in the back seat. What seems to be important are stats, the zeros behind your name as in, the 14 million followers behind @SrBachchan.

‘Why are these newbies following me? What is their agenda?’ This is a comment I read in one of the sites I joined ten months ago. Strange question. It is like rolling down your window at a red traffic light/robot and asking the driver next to you why he is on the road.

My English is not very good but I know that ‘newbie’ means new and it usually means me. I’m always the last person to know what is trending. That comment was loud and clear that new people don’t have numbers. They have ten followers and who wants to deal with that?

Social networking is supposed to be about people. People have faces and these faces talk to each other using Bing, Yahoo or Google. That is why when you open an account online the computer tells you to insert a photo.

This was a big thing when Facebook arrived in town. Sorry, when it hit the airwaves. We had a bath, put on make-up to hide the defects, fixed tired hair, bought new clothes and went to real studios with lights and everything to have our picture taken.

Not anymore. Twitter, Facebook, Hubpages are now hiding places. We go online to hide. We don’t use our 2015 photos. We prefer pets’ photos or animation, which messes up the whole ‘social networking’ thing.

Anonymous people also have all the fun online because they can be rude to other kids. They don’t play nice because we don’t know who they are.

It baffles me but the masks seem to be working. Stats are king. Who cares that I don’t know which country they come from and what they look like? They are a number.

Amitabh Bachchan’s stats are every blogger’s dream, but they will remain just that if we don’t work on our craft. The problem with chasing numbers is that it distracts you from the reason for being out there, online.

Amitabh Bachchan always has his eye on the ball. He tried to be a perfectionist long before e-mail and Instagram. He is still committed to his official blog, despite his family, television and travel commitments. He does work, so should you.