Last year, Gary Barlow's new role on The X Factor's UK judging panel resulted in his joining Twitter, and when the show launched in the US Simon Cowell also registered an official account. It makes sense: if you're going to be on one of TV's biggest shows, you might as well be able to shout at people when they criticise your shoes on a social network.
Cowell's arrival seemed to be particularly reluctant, especially considering that for many years he refused to have a computer in his office, but like the rest of us, celebrities eventually adapt Twitter to their own needs: Barlow mainly opted to tweet photographs of mugs, while Cowell happily started winding up Piers Morgan.
With the opening stages of this year's X Factor already recorded, so comes the Twitter debut of one of its guest judges: singer, former UN ambassador and cultural enigma Geri Halliwell.
Within 48 hours of her first tweet this week, the Heaven And Hell (Being Geri Halliwell) chanteuse had challenged George Michael to a game of tennis, but the important thing is that, like Barlow and Cowell before her, she has quickly established her own Twitter MO, which seems to involve a succession of pictures containing handwritten messages.
Her first such message – the fantastically presumptuous "YES IT'S ME", with its echoes of her own haunting 1999 No 1 Loooooooook At Me – was written in makeup on her back. "Never give up," read the second, not written on any identifiable body part. A third read simply: "Believe."
Her bons mots resemble those of Notebook of Love, the phenomenally successful Twitter account whose 3.1 million followers include Alexandra Burke and Kym Marsh. Notebook followers are treated to such inspirational messages as: "Fake friends are easy to find and easy to lose but real friends are the hardest to find and hardest to lose", and "When your past calls, don't answer. It has nothing new to say." As the account's moving and down-to-earth Twitter bio so emotionally explains: "Advertising: thenotebooktwitter@gmail.com".
If Notebook of Love can get three million followers, perhaps Halliwell's own novel musings can lead her to even greater success. Regardless of how The X Factor goes – and the recent parachuting-in of Nicole Scherzinger for boot camp stages doesn't bode well – Geri could have struck gold.
