It was a pleasant surprise to find that the Associated Press did a profile on Sockington, a Twitter account for a cat. And not just any cat. A cat with over 500,000 followers. A cat that has funny tweets. Sockington is the cat of Jason Scott, who does all the tweeting for him as well.
Scott has created a character with a particular voice by tweeting messages from Sockington’s point of view like: “I must say no comment to the whole dining room incident. No questions please”.
“He’s kind of functioning like a ‘Garfield’ comic,” Scott says. “He’s like the 21st-century Garfield…Everybody wants this social media bubble. They want something where we’re all chattering so much that we all get rich,” Scott says. “And this cat makes everybody look like fools because he’s got hundreds of thousands of followers. And he doesn’t tend to follow anyone but other animals”.
How did he get so many followers? Well for one, Twitter put Sockington on the suggested users list for new user signups so it was easy for him to get a ton of new followers initially without doing anything. But gradually people warmed up to Socks and started spreading the word.