Tweet Congress has had a tremendous impact on how social media is used in government. For instance, one of the great things we’ve seen on Tweet Congress is what we like to call “the TC effect.”
When we add new people to the Tweet Congress directory, they immediately see a jump in new followers. When we added Senator Jim DeMint (@jimdemint) of South Carolina to Tweet Congress in late January 2009, we saw his follower count explode. DeMint had 652 followers in September 2008. On January 23, 2009, the day we added him to the Tweet Congress list, he had 2,165 followers. A week later, he had more than 4,000 followers. Today, Senator DeMint has almost 23,000 followers and is the third most-followed Twitter user in Congress.
We don’t claim to take all the credit for Senator DeMint’s meteoric rise in popularity, but we like to think we had a little something to do with it. People are hungry to communicate with their elected officials and those officials should be just as hungry to let their constituencies know how they are representing them (see Figure 15-1).
Since Twitter indexes tweets for only the previous six days, Tweet Congress has become a resource as the only archive for congressional tweets. Both the public and the media use our site to see what folks in Congress are tweeting about a particular subject. Since we also extract links from tweets and display any photos and videos in them, a better resource for seeing a day in the life of your congressperson simply does not exist.