"Egungun be careful, na Express you dey go": Socialising a Newcomer-Celebrity and Co-constructing Relational Connection on Twitter Nigeria

The paper is a case study on socialising a Nigerian celebrity new to Twitter and the co-construction of relational connection among the interactants on Twitter Nigeria. The data comprise tweets retrieved from the Twitter timeline of the celebrity and subjected to interactional pragmatics analysis. The analysis reveals that the Twitter users deployed the interactional practices of joint fantasising, intertextual allusions and ethnolinguistic repertoire to orient to the newcomer-celebrity's identity, mark their own regular users' identity and co-construct the need for caution by the celebrity. The paper argues that socialising celebrities new to Twitter might include emphasising that their statuses as celebrities might expose them to more savage replies and targeted bullying in the form of ‘dragging’, perhaps more frequently and at a much larger scale than an ‘ordinary’ Twitter user; and that they need to be cautious in their deployment of micro-celebrity strategies targeted at amassing followers/fans on Twitter and in their overall interactional and relational behaviours on Twitter as celebrities. Concerning relational connection, as the architecture of Twitter is not built around people who have prior connections, it is argued that relational connection may need to be co-constructed from scratch by interacting Twitter users who may be total strangers