New Media • June 25th, 2008

Politicians tweet to future voters

by wispundit

You may have heard about a crazy new thing called Twitter lately. The truth is, it’s not that new, and it’s not that crazy. Twitter was launched almost two years ago in July and has since gained almost 2 million users worldwide. The number of Twitter users is constantly growing, as is the sites popularity; around 2 million tweets are sent each day. As you’ll read below, a few politicians have started using Twitter and one has seen overwhelming success.

What is Twitter? Well, as confusing as it sounds, the idea behind the service is very simple. The service is based on the question “What are you doing now?” and from that, you can communicate your own or your business’s status to the world. Twitter was created as a cross-platform tool to communicate your status to friends. All you have to do is create an account, find some people to follow, find some people to follow you, and start tweeting. The beauty of it all is that your followers can choose how they would like to receive your updates, either by text message, instant message, or on the web. You can also update your status from your mobile phone, instant messenger, on the website, or through the multitude of applications and plug-ins that have been created just to tweet.

What can this do for you? Twitter may have been intended for individual use, but it hasn’t taken long for a few enterprising minds to think of ways to use this in political settings.

For example, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and John McCain have all embraced the service as a way to recruit and communicate with America’s youth. While it has been successful for two of them, Obama is leading with nearly 42,000 people following him over Clinton’s 4,142 and McCain’s 68. What’s interesting about Obama’s use is that not only does he have thousands of followers, but he is also following over 43,000 people; imagine the tweets he gets. Click the links for their pages. Obama. Clinton. McCain.

The bottom line is that we are living in an age where information is updated and disbursed every second. For a politician to succeed, they will have to figure out how to keep up. Will Twitter be the way?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 1:48 pm and is filed under New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.