So, some of you may have heard of Twitter. I say that with more than a little tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, as you’d be hard-pressed to turn on your television or computer or walk down the street without hearing multiple pleas from news anchors, celebrities, musicians, and your friends and neighbors to “follow” them on the trendy microblogging service. For a technology that in many ways subverts the traditional media, the media has an undeniable love affair with Twitter, twitterers, and tweets. Oprah is on Twitter, my dad joined Twitter, and…the U.S. House cafeteria is on Twitter? If you’re anything like me (and by me I mean @nickschaper), you may be suffering from occasional bouts of Twitter-publicity fatigue.
Not to worry, I won’t be bothering you with yet another description of Twitter. What I do want to explore is a phenomenon that has gone largely unnoticed to those outside the beltway new media world: far more Republican members of Congress are using Twitter than Democrats. Not exactly an earth-shaking revelation in and of itself, but the fact remains that one of the newer, shinier tools in the new media shed is solidly the domain of the GOP in Congress. Figure 16-1, from TweetCongress.org, depicts the number of Republican and Democrat users in the U.S. House and Senate. As you can see, Republicans outnumber Democrats on Twitter by more than 2 to 1. (For more on Tweet Congress, see Chapter 15.)
The minority has taken to Twitter because it exemplifies the entrepreneurial insurgent mindset. As a simple tool that has the power to not only reach thousands, but also receive their feedback and quickly judge public sentiment, Twitter is a powerful device. Using Tweetreach.com I recently observed the spread of a tweet sent from Leader Boehner (@gopleader); see Figure 16-2. The tweet itself was simply highlighting a Politico article noting the party disparity on Twitter I’ve described. In less than a matter of minutes, Tweetreach estimated more than 60,000 impressions of the link we transmitted to our modest list of 7,000 or so followers. Not too bad for fewer than 140 keystrokes.
“So what?” many will say. So Republicans figured out how to use Twitter, big deal. They’ve got only a few thousand followers anyway, and are they even tweeting themselves? Because as so many in the twittering class will tell you, if a politician isn’t sending his own tweets, reviewing all his replies, following all his followers, and keeping up with #musicmondays and #followfridays, then he’s not doing it right, right? #wrong.[163] Like people all over the world, members on both sides of the aisle are using Twitter in ways that reflect their styles. Some are intensely personal, others just like to share links to what they’re reading, and still others have their RSS feeds running the entire operation on autopilot. I reject the notion that there is a right way to use Twitter and other popular social media tools. Certainly, some are more effective than others, and we all surely have much left to learn. But the fact that an institution known best for 200 years of tradition is finding new ways to connect with the electorate should be encouraging to all of us.
So, maybe Twitter is the exception—the talk radio of the new media landscape. By many expert accounts, it might not even be with us in a year or two (as an aside, I’m certain that most who smugly note the company’s huge user base and lack of plan to monetize would be quite happy to have such problems). But what if Twitter isn’t the only example?