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Die US-Präsidentschaftswahl 2012 pp 425–442Cite as

May the Best Tweeter Win: The Twitter Strategies of Key Campaign Accounts in the 2012 US Election

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Abstract

The analysis of the main Obama and Romney accounts provides new information into how the major candidates and their campaigns use social media, taking in their styles of tweeting, interactions or acknowledgement of their opposition, links to other sources and content, and the use of promotion tweets for campaign advertising. The analysis reveals markedly different tweeting strategies amongst the examined Twitter accounts. @BarackObama and @Obama2012 choose to engage almost solely with their own supporters, while the Accounts from the other side of the aisle are much more interested in taking the fight to the opponent. The specific use of Twitter as a campaign medium resonates with the different electoral positioning of the two campaigns. Taking into account the analysis of the communications strategies of the contestants, “Team Obama” was more successful in connecting to the Twitter userbase, adding a new facet to its overall campaign strategy. Additionally, Team Romney seems to be limited by its strategic disadvantage as challenger—their turning away from the personal account @MittRomney to @TeamRomney revealed a more “aggressive” tweeting pattern, in the light of the analysis it turned out to be not the right decision, as it failed to connect with a broader Twitter userbase. Overall, the Twitter strategies of the candidates resonate with the general character traits of the respective campaigns. Due to technological developments and the constantly changing digital ecosystem it remains to be seen, how specific Twitter strategies will be applied in upcoming campaigns.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    At the time of the election, the @BarackObama account was still run by Obama’s campaign staff; however, in January 2013 the account and other campaign-related Web-based material were handed over to the non-profit group Organizing for Action, although the account still appeared as @BarackObama (Bump 2013).

  2. 2.

    Note that the ‘.@user’ syntax at the beginning of the tweet is used to ensure that the message is visible to all Twitter users; tweets starting with ‘@user’ can be seen only by other Twitter users who follow both the sender and receiver of the @mention. The Romney campaign’s knowledge of this difference, which many ordinary users may be unaware of, points to a certain sophistication in its use of the platform.

  3. 3.

    Late September and early October also saw the start of early and absentee voting in most states.

  4. 4.

    In the context of this discussion, we again note that the limitations of the Twitter API mean that the volumes shown in this and the following graphs are almost certainly lower than the total volumes of such activity, especially for times of particularly high Twitter activity around the US election. However, the relative patterns which distinguish the different campaign accounts will remain the same even if our access to Twitter data was throttled by the API. Further, we remind readers that a server outage on 11 and 12 October resulted in data loss during those days.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, 4001, Brisbane, Australia

    Prof. Dr. Axel Bruns & Dr. Tim Highfield

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  1. Prof. Dr. Axel Bruns
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  2. Dr. Tim Highfield
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Correspondence to Axel Bruns .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany

    Christoph Bieber

  2. HdM Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Klaus Kamps

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Bruns, A., Highfield, T. (2016). May the Best Tweeter Win: The Twitter Strategies of Key Campaign Accounts in the 2012 US Election. In: Bieber, C., Kamps, K. (eds) Die US-Präsidentschaftswahl 2012. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-19767-8_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-19767-8_18

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