Spanish Tweets
Jennifer Lopez, on the other hand, is fluent in Spanish. At a rate a bit higher than Selena, 0.7% of Jennifer Lopez’s tweets were in Spanish (90 tweets out of 12,300 tweets). While this percentage of tweets in Spanish is 10 times as much as Selena Gomez’s percentage, it is still remarkably low. Similar to Selena’s use, several of her Spanish tweets advertise products or albums that she is selling. However, unlike Selena Gomez, Jennifer Lopez also writes many tweets in Spanish that are not directly related to marketing, such as tweets in which she offers support to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
Finally, Sofia Vergara tweeted in Spanish the most, with 3.4% of her tweets (246 out of 7,232 tweets total) written in Spanish. In addition to posting in Spanish more often than Jennifer Lopez and Selena Gomez, Sofia Vergara also appears to be more likely to tweet in Spanish about things unrelated to marketing. This is probably due to the fact that Sofia Vergara grew up in Colombia, a Spanish-speaking country, whereas Jennifer Lopez grew up with Spanish-speaking parents in New York City. The longer exposure to Spanish for Sofia might explain why she is more likely than her US-born counterparts to tweet in Spanish, yet 3.4% is a surprisingly low percentage for someone who is a native Spanish-speaker and got her start in acting on Spanish-language channels. In her case, the low percentage of Spanish tweets is a much clearer decision to connect with an English audience for marketing purposes.
In the case of all three celebrities, the low frequency of Spanish tweets can be largely attributed to their audience; while all three have many fans that appreciate their Latina heritage, they also have many fans in the US who only speak English. Since Twitter is a platform for celebrities to advertise themselves and connect with fans, it makes sense that celebrities with a lot of fans in the US would tweet mostly in English. If Jennifer Lopez, for example, were writing every other tweet in Spanish, she could risk isolating some of her English fans. A recent study by Pew Research indicates that a decreasing share of Latinas actually speaks Spanish. Therefore, all three celebrities are able to reach out to their Latina fans by using both English and Spanish tweets. However, the overwhelming majority of tweets being in English, as opposed to having duplicate tweets in English and Spanish, implies that these celebrities are not prioritizing expression of their latinidad and connecting to other Latinas as part of their marketing strategy.
