President Barack Obama may be the most popular politician on Twitter, but the rest of his party is lagging behind.
Not only are there less Democratic congressman and senators using Twitter, Republicans are tweeting 30 percent more and are more engaged with its constituents, according to a new study from Edelman Digital, a public relations firm.
Overall, Senate Republicans averaged about 5,400 mentions per Twitter handle while Democrats averaged 4,419. It was a similar story in the House of Representatives where Republicans averaged 3,270 mentions per Twitter handle, while the Democrats collected 1,584, reported the study:
“Republicans, on average, exhibited an edge over Democrats, with the gap separating Senators’ and Representatives’ influence scores being even larger. … Most influential, according to TweetLevel, were the Senate Republicans, followed by Senate Democrats and House Republicans, with house Democrats on the low end.”
Using TweetCongress and C-SPAN’s Twitter list, Edelman analyzed more than 59,000 tweets from 456 politicians (89 U.S. Senators and 367 U.S. Representatives) over 112 days.
The study also found that Republicans tweeted 52 percent more links than Democrats. Interestingly, Republicans also tweeted 3.5 more times about legislation, particularly “H.R. 822, concerning the right of Americans with permits to carry concealed firearms across state lines,” Edelman reported.
As noted by Alex Howard, the findings appear to reiterate the 2010 study Twitter in Congress, which asserted that Democrats used Twitter as a tool for transparency, while Republicans were dominated every other measure in terms of volume.
Even in politics, the relatively old adage appears to hold true for Republicans: tweet early, tweet often.
Illustration from DonkeyHotey, remix by Fernando Alfonso III