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

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May the Best Tweeter Win: the Twitter Strategies of Key Campaign Accounts in the 2012 US Election May the Best Tweeter Win: The Twitter Strategies of Key Campaign Accounts in the 2012 US Election Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, Australia a.bruns | t.highfield @ qut.edu.au http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ Introduction The increasingly widespread use of Twitter as a medium for political announcements and commentary has accompanied social media’s integration into election campaigns, as candidates, political parties, advocacy groups, and voters alike publish their thoughts and interact around electoral issues. The growing presence of social media within such campaigns is a global trend, and visible within national, regional, local, and international elections as Websites such as Twitter are adopted as additional campaigning tools. Studies of the role of Twitter within election campaigns around the world have investigated different aspects of social media’s place within election campaigns, including the use of Twitter by candidates and political parties (Bruns & Highfield, 2013; Christensen, 2013; Graham, Broersma, Hazelhoff, & van ’t Haar, 2013), election coverage around particular events, such as debates (Elmer, 2013), and election coverage based on one or more key hashtags or keywords (Bruns & Burgess, 2011; Dang-Xuan, Stieglitz, Wladarsch, & Neuberger, 2013; Larsson & Moe, 2012). In this study, the use of Twitter by candidates is of particular interest. Research into the tweeting strategies of candidates has found a number of different approaches employed, and general variations on a national level. Broersma and Graham (2012), for example, compared Dutch and British politicians and candidates on Twitter, finding that while British accounts tended towards treating Twitter as a broadcast medium – sharing messages without responding to others – their Dutch counterparts were more likely to interact with other Twitter users. Similarly, during the 2012 election in the Australian state of Queensland, the two major parties employed different approaches to Twitter, from widespread interactions with other users and engaging with opposition candidates, to broadcasting announcements and conversing with fellow party members (Bruns & Highfield, 2013). However, it should be noted that even among these different national examples, individual politicians might employ their own approaches, whether broadcasting, interacting, or using an alternative strategy, and other factors will have some bearing on tweeting, including the electoral context of each campaign, the parties involved, and the candidate’s previous use of Twitter and other social media platforms. In the US, the 2012 presidential election marked Twitter’s first use as a mainstream electoral campaigning tool. Although an active social media platform in 2008, used for live coverage of key events, including debates (Carpenter, 2010), candidates did not employ it to the same extent as social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook (compare Rosenstiel & Mitchell, 2012; Smith & Rainie, 2008). As Karpf (2012) notes, though, the Internet for each election is different, due to the development of new functionalities, accessibility, platforms, and uses; the moniker of the first ‘Internet election’ has followed previous campaigns, from the 2004 presidential election, which saw Howard Dean’s online fundraising (Hindman, 2009; Meraz, 1 2007) and the rise of the political blogosphere (Adamic & Glance, 2005), to 2008 and the Obama campaign’s adoption of Websites such as Facebook and YouTube, drawing on online social networks to spread messages and attract donations (Perlmutter, 2008; Smith & Rainie, 2008; Vaccari, 2010). In this study, we focus on the accounts belonging to, and associated with, the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates; while U.S. politics is dominated by these two parties, such that the winning candidate will either be Republican or Democrat, third-party candidates do still contest the election, and the use of Twitter by four of these candidates within the 2012 campaign is studied by Christensen (2013). Our 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 of these tweeting strategies also allows us to identify which approaches may be most successful, in terms of effective use of social media, in future campaigns. Methodology This study utilises the open source Twitter tracking tool yourTwapperkeeper (2013), which connects to the Twitter API to track specific keywords or hashtags as selected by its operator (see Bruns & Liang, 2012 for more details). In yourTwapperkeeper, it is possible to use the Twitter handles of known accounts as search terms, resulting in datasets which contain all tweets from as well as referring to those users; since a Twitter API change in the first half of 2012, this also includes retweets of these users’ messages which were made using Twitter’s ‘retweet button’, as well as @mentions and manual retweets. For the purposes of the present study, we tracked a number of accounts belonging to the Democrat and Republican presidential campaigns in the 2012 US election; these included the accounts of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates (@BarackObama, @MittRomney, @JoeBiden, and @PaulRyanVP) as well as the central campaign accounts (@Obama2012 and @TeamRomney).1 This approach introduces a number of unavoidable limitations which must be noted here. In the absence of the substantial funding required to access the full Twitter ‘firehose’ of all tweets, our yourTwapperkeeper installation connected to the standard, free Twitter streaming API; data delivery through this API is mandatorily throttled to a maximum of one per cent of the total current throughput of tweets being made globally (Morstatter, Pfeffer, Liu, & Carley, 2013; Twitter, 2012). For our study, which deals with a significant global event which would have generated a substantial number of tweets especially at key moments during the campaign (such as the televised debates or election night itself), this means that our dataset will be incomplete especially during such moments of heightened activity; further, there is no reliable information available which would identify how many tweets we may have missed. However, such throttling is likely to occur only at the key moments of the campaign, while the central focus of this chapter is to examine the overall strategies of tweeting activity by the campaign accounts, and the resonance these activities had amongst Twitter users. Further, this throttling is systematic and indiscriminate, thus affecting all accounts tracked by this study to equal extent; while the exact volume of tweets we captured will be less than that which may have been observed by users at the time, the overall patterns in activity and the relative differences in tweeting style between the accounts will have remained the same. Importantly, such limitations are not specific to our study: they apply to most Twitter research projects, the vast majority of which similarly draw on the open Twitter API without being able to afford paid access to the firehose. Further, in addition to this systematic limitation, our server underwent maintenance during 11 and 12 October 2012, meaning that only a fraction of relevant tweets were captured during that timeframe. Using a range of methods and metrics described by Bruns and Stieglitz (2013a, 2013b), we processed these datasets, in the first place to distinguish between the tweeting activities of the campaign accounts and the 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 references (including @mentions and manual as well as button retweets) received by these accounts. Such activities can be divided into a number of subsets, in the first place by distinguishing types of tweets (original tweets which are neither @mention nor retweet; as well as genuine @mentions and retweets); from the metadata provided by the Twitter API, we are also able to determine the facility through which tweets were sent (such as the standard Twitter Web interface, third-party clients, or the ‘promoted tweets’ advertising scheme provided by Twitter, Inc.). Further, we are able to extract the Twitter accounts mentioned as well as the URLs referenced in tweets, in order to establish for each of the campaign accounts the network of other users it engages with, and the range of information sources it most frequently refers to. Analysis In the present article, we focus on the final two months of the long 2012 primary and presidential campaign cycle: we examine a period from 9 September to 11 November 2012 – that is, from just after the Democratic National Convention on 3-6 September which nominated President Obama as the Democrats’ candidate (the Republican National Convention had taken place earlier, on 27-30 August) to just after election day on 6 November 2012. (In the analysis below, all dates and times are taken to be US Eastern Time.) Fig. 1: tweets by key accounts: @BarackObama (top left), @MittRomney
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