What Happens When Celebs Clumsily Tweet to Promote Their Projects

At Splitsider this week, Meredith Haggerty expertly explored what happens to the social media accounts of television shows that go off the air. “Sad things,” she concludes. Well, while the accounts of actual people who join social media platforms to promote said shows aren’t always quite as sad, they are pretty funny in their own ways.

When an actor joins social media to promote a project, sometimes it turns out well, sometimes it doesn’t. Behold the myriad of ways these experiments go.

Exhibit A: The Newbie

Justin Prentice is a young actor you may or may not have heard of who joined Twitter in 2011.

He then didn’t tweet for a year. Prentice began again when he got cast on Malibu Country (a cancelled show which has a particularly sad Twitter account, as Haggerty points out in her piece).

After that, Prentice was pretty consistent about tweeting, until he wasn’t, taking a year break from the service again. Finally he got another job and, low and behold, took up with it again a few months ago.

Cool.

Exhibit B: The Start-and-Stopper

Formerly of The West Wing, Whitford was cast on the sadly cancelled Trophy Wife last year. According to him, he joined Twitter at the behest of his then-TV daughter Bailee Madison, though during his brief eight months on the platform, he mostly attempted to live-tweet the show, sharing occasional West Wing reunion vids and a goodbye to Philip Seymour Hoffman.

His feed has not included a tweet since May, and most of the last ones were goodbyes to the show. This prompted his former coworker Joshua Malina (now on Scandal) to remark last week that Whitford’s feed was “depressing.”

Exhibit C: The Occasional Poster

Though Robin Williams joined Twitter and Instagram somewhat inauspiciously, the move was clearly pegged to the release of his show The Crazy Ones in the fall of 2013.

According to Twitter, Robin Williams and former co-star Sarah Michelle Geller share a robust friendship (Geller also joined the service for the show, but seems to have dug it enough to stick around). While Williams does not seem to have caught the social media bug the way @RealSMG has, he’s still chugging along, sharing content and generally enjoying himself.

Exhibit D: The Easily Distracted

Cameron Diaz joined Twitter and Instagram in November to promote her new book The Body Book. For a period of a few months, her feeds were mostly dominated by content about that project, though she was quite active about interacting with enthusiastic fans.

Cameron kept on going after the book was released as she worked to promote her next big project, The Other Woman. But besides a crazy spree on Christmas Day when she retweeted basically anyone who tweeted “Merry Christmas” at her, she hasn’t tweeted or Instagrammed since March when it came out, though her Instagram did feature some more personal pictures, like this picture of her good friend Drew Barrymore.

Exhibit E: The Inconsistently Entertaining

William H. Macy joined Twitter when he began working on Shameless in 2010.

He become somewhat of a delight on Twitter, posting funny and personal things semi-regularly.

Well, except for the very long hiatus he took between 2010…

…and 2014.

Don’t worry, it seems like he’s back with a vengeance now.

Exhibit F: Taye Diggs

Though Taye Diggs has only recently gotten attention for his activities on Twitter (and Vine), he actually joined back in 2011 to promote his children’s book Chocolate Me.

Taye has gotten made fun of for following basically everyone, but his actual tweets were pretty entertaining before he got ready to up his game for his new show Murder in the First. Don’t go too far into his feed because you’ll see sad reminders of the love he once shared with Idina Menzel, but he still likes to share stuff about sports and just um, stuff that’s happening in his life.

Because of what he’s done with the medium – and the attention he’s gotten for it – Taye Diggs gets his own category. Congrats, Taye Diggs.