Rupert Murdoch turns 100. On Twitter. Sort of.

The beleaguered media mogul's first month tweeting has won a mostly warm reception.

Given the daily outpouring of damaging revelations (like this) – in which the name Rupert Murdoch seems to feature more often in the headline rather than behind it – you’d think the News Corp boss might want to keep his head down. But whatever the advice of his PR colonels, Rupert thought it a good time to join the tweeting fandango.

While it took a while for Twitter users to be persuaded that it really was Rupey (an account in the name of his wife Wendi Deng turned out to be a fake, despite having been granted one of Twitter’s official “verified user” badges), he’s fitted in nicely.

The Australian-American mogul recently passed “the milestone of his 100th tweet”, writes Sally Jackson in the Murdoch-owned Australian, and has “raced to more than 160,000 followers”. He doesn’t have the volume of followers of, say, Charlie Sheen (more than a million), says Jackson, but he has influence.

Klout, a company that measures social media influence, describes Mr Murdoch as a “taste maker” and gives him a “Klout score” of 80. The average Klout score is 20 … “You know what you like and your audience likes it too,” Klout says of Mr Murdoch’s Twitter style. “You know what’s trending, but you do more than just follow the crowd. You have your own opinion that earns respect from your network.”

The mercurial New York Times media columnist David Carr has been following Murdoch on Twitter, and so far he’s impressed.

The rules of effective tweeting for business leaders are no different from the ones for us mere mortals who want to both express ourselves and remain employed: Don’t be boring, don’t curse, and for heaven’s sake, don’t always be shouting about how some junior executive is really knocking it dead.

And:

Being interesting is the key to going viral, and on that score, I’d give Mr Murdoch decent marks. After a month of reading Mr Murdoch’s posts, I have to say there’s something refreshing about the directness of the medium and, yes, the man using it.

Here’s Murdoch’s latest Twitter litter: