When the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth, there was frenzy in the Twitter world. The new Princess has been born into the social media age, a time when tradition gets replaced with a 140 character message on social media. To make sure that the news of the royal birth got to as many people as possible, The Royal Family are now embracing and celebrating social media themselves.
The email from Kensington Palace to royal correspondents announcing the birth
By 8pm on Sunday evening, just under 12 hours since the Princess was born, over 1,000,000 tweets were sent on Twitter about the new Royal Baby. People across the world were sharing the news, from Canada to New Zealand.
In the past, news of a royal birth would be announced via press agencies. The press agencies would send an email to broadcasters, media institutions and royal correspondents that announced the news. Then these people would relay the email to the world’s people.
However, as yesterday proved, the procedure has now changed entirely. Instead the news was broken on Kensington Palace’s Twitter account @KensingtonRoyal at 11:09 with the message “Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cambridge was safely delivered of a daughter at 8.34am.” An email to royal correspondents was sent one minute later at 11:10.
The tweet announcing the birth now has almost 50,000 retweets. In addition to announcing the arrival of the Princess via social media, Kensington Palace also announced the Duchess of Cambridge being admitted to St Mary’s Hospital in the same way.
Despite there being much more focus on social media in the royal households in recent times, tradition still occurs in it’s full pomp and grandeur. An example of this would be the traditional birth notice on an easel outside Buckingham Palace.
The Royal Family are now much more open to social media with many members, including The Duke of York, now having their personal Twitter accounts. Even The Queen has sent a tweet on the British Monarchy account!
Kensington Palace only joined Twitter in January of this year and four months later it has nearly 400,000 followers.
To read more about how The Royal Family embrace social media, click here.
