Twitter Community in Lebanon

Twitter in Lebanon

Did you participate in the 14^th of January protest against rape?
Did you attend the last event organized by Sarah’s bag “Behind the scenes”?

Where did you get your invitation from?  Twitter. Of course!

Citizens, governments and companies are becoming more and more active on social networks in Lebanon and especially on twitter since the beginning of 2011. Whether to post interesting links to articles, invitations to events or encouragements to participate in manifestations, people are constantly tweeting and re-tweeting.

But it seems that Lebanese personalities are ahead of the competition.

Haifa Wehbe has already tweeted 8,949 times and has 308,429 followers!

In fact, if we look at the current top 10 twitter ranking in Lebanon based on the amounts of followers, we notice that it includes 4 Lebanese singers: Elissa Khoury, Ragheb Alama, Nancy Ajram and Haifa Wehbe, 2 Lebanese politicians: Saad Hariri and Najib Mikati, 2 Lebanese talk show hosts: Zaven Kouyoumdjian and Mona Abou Hamze as well as a religious figure Sayyed Ali El Amin and a Lebanese actor and director Nadine Labaki.

In addition, although not currently in the top 10, Myriam Fares has 137,819 followers and has tweeted 1,092 times. Moreover, Marcel Ghanem, host of many famous TV shows on LBC, has 69,334 followers. Ministers Ziad Baroud, Nicolas Sehnaoui and Gebran Bassil are also very active on Twitter and the list goes on…

The domination of these public figures on social network affects the online community since many Lebanese sign up on twitter just to follow a certain personality and sometimes even just to criticize him by tagging him in mean comments. In addition, Lebanese citizens exteriorize themselves on twitter, as “it is the only place where they can talk and be heard”.  They create hash tags such as #Lebanese electricity to complain about electricity cutoffs.

As for social causes, followers feel encouraged when personalities re-tweet their tweets and it helps them reach a larger audience.

Therefore, through this social networking platform, public figures discuss political or musical events with their followers, share some quotes or ideas, support and encourage certain happenings and respond to questions asked by their followers.

Most of them have more replies than tweets!

Not yet on twitter? Too bad! You won’t be able to catch up!