Republicans Out-Tweet Democrats

U.S. News: Twitter On Capitol Hill

While progressive blogs, with the encouragement of DNC Chairman Howard Dean, helped power Democratic electoral wins in 2006 and 2008, many in the Democratic party have been reticent about, and towards, its blogosphere echo chamber and the even the adoption of new media tools and strategies.

And now it seems that reticence has carried over into the use of Twitter. [Politico.com]

Nearly twice as many Republicans as Democrats have accounts on the social networking platform Twitter (101 compared with 57), and the GOP dominates Twitter usage by an even wider margin, according to a report released this week by the Congressional Research Service that analyzed two week long periods in July and August.

Republicans are all a'twitter HotLineTV Talks Twitter

During those spans, congressional Republicans posted 932 messages — or tweets — compared with 255 for Democrats, CRS analysts found.

Twitter allows users to text short messages of 140 characters or fewer from their phones, BlackBerrys or computers to their profile pages and their followers’ phones and computers.

Although some experts question the effectiveness of Twitter as a political communication tool and more than a few lawmakers have already experienced the downside of the unfiltered communication it offers, Republican communications staffers have actively encouraged their lawmakers to tweet away. And so they have.

Democrats seem all too willing to let it all slip away by not leveraging the new media approach to political campaigning.

In just a few short months, Twitter has become a necessary tool for anyone interested in politics and government. But unless you find the right people to follow, it can be hard to make the most of it.

Making it easier to find the right people to follow comes, Twiangulate, a new Twitter analysis tool, debuts this morning. It's definitely worth checking out.







Here are some an examples of some of the interesting information that Twiangulate provides:

• Sen. John McCain is the only tweeter followed by all three network Sunday show hosts: George Stephanopoulos, David Gregory and Bob Schieffer.
• Michelle Malkin and Markos Moulitsas -- polar opposites when it comes to politics -- each follow hundreds of Twitterers but have only a dozen in common, including Political Wire.
• Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper and I follow 18 of the same people, including political analyst Jennifer Duffy who is relatively new to Twitter.

Twiangulate was developed at BlogAds, which sells ads on some of the biggest political blogs on the web.