Well everyone’s talking about it. News reporters are living and breathing it, so we felt compelled to write about it too. The imminent arrival of third in line to the throne, William and Kate’s Royal Baby. Now as much as we love babies here at TW, and the pitter patter of tiny royal feet is going to be pretty awesome, we’re waiting for the stork of social media to drop off its finest display.
So far we’ve seen thousands of spoof twitter and Facebook pages pop up, all claiming to know the ins and outs of Kate and Will’s life. The Sun newspaper featured a rather tasteless prank dressing up two royal lookalikes outside the hospital then pushing out the pictures via social media. Royal Baby Watch (#royalbabywatch) is one of the most searched terms on Twitter, being quoted by nearly every major news broadcaster worth their salt. There’s even been speculation the baby’s name will be revealed via a Hash tag on twitter rather than the usual public announcement by a member of the Monarchy.
Royal Baby News on Facebook has over 83,000 likes, and growing, and there are numerous spoof Twitter accounts, even one named @royalfetus which shockingly has over 15,000 followers.
How things have changed for a Royal Baby!
How things have changed in 31 years, since Prince William was born in the same hospital. The slower process of waiting for the official details to be announced via the Palace to the press, then follow onto the news on TV, we’d wait a day or so to read about it in the broadsheets and tabloids, and any bets made on the sex or name would’ve been done via a bookies. Now with the power of Social Media, we’ll probably know about the birth within seconds, and if they really want to be hip they’ll consider hash tagging the name, ok maybe a step too far. And we don’t need a bookie to count his betting slips to find out the most popular guesses on names and sex, according to social media users, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will have a little girl and will name her Alexandra, this was taken from Synthesio, a global social media monitoring and analysis software provider.
Has public interest been amplified because of social media? Possibly! Does this matter? No! I think the fact that news updates are so easy to obtain (provided it is from the correct source) it’s almost impossible not to be swept up by it all. So with this in mind I’m going for a Royal baby girl named Elizabeth.