Is The Next American Idol Going To Tweet His or Her Way To The Top?

Becky Bain | February 19, 2010 5:00 pm

This is the first season of American Idol to allow contestants to maintain their own MySpace pages, Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles. Of course, their new social media identities are Fox-approved, so we’re sure their tweets and status updates are going to be watched very closely. (In other words, don’t expect to see any Twitter wars, incoherent wall posts or scandalous photo uploads. At least until they’re off the show.)

But Idol’s newfound appreciation for social networking in Season 9 still is itself revealing, for cultural anthropologists and Idol geeks alike.

Andrew Garcia, the contestant with arguably the most memorable performance (his acoustic take on Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up”), currently has the most Twitter followers, with over 6,147. Whereas John Park, who made a great first impression but who was barely seen again until he made the Top 24, has the most Facebook friends, over 3,513 as of Friday afternoon.

But wait! Aren’t the judges all-but-declaring outright that a girl will win this whole thing? The female contestant with the most followers on either platform is 16-year old Katie Stevens, with 1,280 on Twitter and 1,113 on Facebook. She’s ahead of all the other girls, but only by a small margin, and she’s still significantly behind both Andrew and John.

Could John and Andrew’s quickly-rising online popularity be that viewers who find these two men attractive, most likely younger females, are more aggressive in their attempt to make sure their crush gets to the top? These would be the same types of viewers who obsessively called (and called… and called…)  to vote for David Archuleta and Kris Allen in seasons past. (Then again, for comparison’s sake, hunky Casey James has less than one thousand Facebook friends and not quite 1,500 Twitter followers. So taking your shirt off to reveal your killer abs on national television doesn’t necessarily mean insta-fandom. At least from anyone other than Kara.)

Perhaps John and Andrew just made that great an impression on the audience, regardless of how much screen time they received. But what we can gather from this is, unless Andrew and John have terrible performances in the next few weeks, we’re sure to be seeing them in the Top 12. And as much as Randy, Kara and Simon pontificate that a girl will be the next American Idol winner, the public’s interest in the female contestants seems lukewarm at this point.

Idol’s decision to let the kids operate on social media will also be interesting because we’ll get to see how popularity among Web-savvy fans compares to popularity among the Idol-viewing public as a whole (because, believe it or not, there are people out there who don’t indulge in the silliness of Twitter or Facebook).

Once the performers get equal screen time—and more opportunities to sink or swim—these numbers are bound to change, especially since this rule change also means contestants will be able to campaign for votes all the time instead of just once a week. But we’re not calling it a girl’s title to lose quite yet.