Twitter and Campaigns

I thought of doing this post when my AP government students mentioned how much they have seen Obama's Tweets - even my Republicans agreed.  Here, first off is an article on how the Republicans are using it and here are Romney's Tweets.

This is a fascinating page put together by two campaign strategists who are obviously trying to show the importance of Twitter.  The page shows the number of Tweets, retweets, followers added, etc. in the past day.  The page also has a ton of useful Twitter handles you might want to follow.   Another item (early on the trails) was a Republican Town Hall meeting on Twitter.  Here is the strategists' homepage (note they get paid to use Twitter for candidates) and it has a number of interesting links (such as the articles on them).

You can even pay Twitter to run your political ads as the site announced last fall.

Finally one of my favorite sites for research, Pew Research did a study last fall which found, among other things, that there is a much higher degree of negative comments on Twitter than not and according to this page (and a nice summary of the Pew story) one is nine times more likely to read about a campaign on Twitter than a blog.