The Twitter Demographic February 21, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : Off Topic , add a commentI was checking out the US presidential candidates presence on various social media. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both have Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook accounts. I don’t think John McCain is on any of them as the ones I found are likely spoof accounts.
As a candidate, you can have your young, hip staff create these sites for you, but the staff can’t make them popular. Clinton’s Facebook profile has 120,000 supporters while Obama’s has 600,000. Definitely a good following for both. Obama’s substantial lead is an indication of his appeal to the Facebook demographic (not sure what this really is anymore but let’s say it’s primarily 21-34 year olds — which I am not a member, sadly). His lead over Clinton gets very interesting when looking at Twitter.
Hillary Clinton has only 473 followers on Twitter. I’m pretty sure this is her official Twitter profile as it is the most popular Clinton one and the tweets seem official (albeit boring as hell). Now looking at Barack Obama’s, he has 6,661 followers (some are pretty interesting)! Clearly, a domination in this demographic. Which leads of course to, what is the “Twitter demographic”? Lonely, Prius-driving, 20-somethings (Barack’s base!) is a popular consensus, but Twitter is becoming pretty mainstream pretty fast. I don’t have an empirical stereotypical profile for the demographic, but it is clearly somehow favored to Obama.
The gap between Clinton and Obama on Twitter really deserves some analysis. One thing I noticed is that if you follow Obama, he’ll follow you back. Clinton doesn’t do this, so maybe Barack’s approach has some appeal for people to tell others that they can have him follow them too. Also, his tweets are inspiring and informative, while Hillary’s sound like a to-do list.
If I were an aspiring intern on the Obama campaign, I’d do a quick research study to find out why he is dramatically more appealing to the Twitter crowd than Clinton. Take the results to the campaign leadership (go over your boss’ head if you have to) and outline a targeted campaign for volunteers and votes. You will be guaranteed a plum position in an Obama administration. And when you figure out the Twitter demographic and get your promotion, please send me the research results so I can target the same people. Thanks and you’re welcome.
