Qorvis Communications released an analysis of the impact of Twitter on the 2009 gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey and the January 19, 2010, Senate special election in Massachusetts.
The study, “Twitter Trends in Off-Year Elections: Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts,” was conducted by Wyeth Ruthven, a senior director at Qorvis and a former press secretary to Congressman Lloyd Doggett and the South Carolina Democratic Party.
“Social media is not like making spaghetti, campaigns shouldn’t throw it at the wall and see what sticks,” says Ruthven. “Campaigns should integrate Twitter into their strategies while understanding the unique needs of the medium. Social media should not be an afterthought.”
Ruthven analyzed more than 2,500 tweets by the four gubernatorial campaigns and their staff during the final three months of the elections. Analysis of the Massachusetts Senate election examined over 900 tweets during the three-month period from the November 3, 2009, filing deadline through the January 19, 2010, election. Ruthven adopted the methodology of previous Twitter analytic studies, classifying tweets into various categories for in-depth analysis.
The Qorvis study found that:
· Twitter largely remains a one-way medium for campaigns. However, staff are beginning to use conversational tweets to reach out to reporters and voters on Twitter.
· The Massachusetts Senate election was more conversational than other campaigns. Both Mass. candidates devoted approximately one out of every five tweets to direct communication with individual followers.
· In the month after winning their respective party primaries, Scott Brown out-tweeted Martha Coakley by a 3-to-1 margin, 232 to 77.
· Scott Brown’s Twitter feed grew exponentially as national attention on the race increased. Brown’s Twitter followers increased by 235 percent in the last week of the campaign, and by 600 percent from January 1 to Election Day.
· The majority of tweets by the campaigns centered on self-promotional information, such as links to campaign materials. Creigh Deeds was the exception. Non-campaign personal observations accounted for a plurality (44.32 percent) of his tweets. In fact, Deeds devoted more tweets to his musical tastes (39 tweets) than to his transportation plan (1).
· Multiple Twitter accounts led to message dilution. Campaigns that maintained more than one account (6 by the Deeds campaign, 3 by the Christie campaign) found that their messages failed to reach a wide audience.
· By contrast, campaigns with a single-account Twitter strategy – Jon Corzine and Bob McDonnell – had the greatest reach on Twitter.
· Issues that were prominent in the campaigns at large were similarly prominent on Twitter. Across multiple Deeds campaign Twitter feeds, tweets about Bob McDonnell's thesis exceeded tweets about transportation policy by a ratio of 3-to-1. In New Jersey, Republican candidate Chris Christie’s campaign devoted 15 percent of tweets to the issues of property taxes and political corruption.
· In New Jersey, both campaigns relied heavily on social media tools such as TwitPic and Flickr to share campaign photos via Twitter. Approximately one out of every three tweets by the Corzine and Christie campaigns was a link to a campaign photo.
Ruthven used these findings to recommend several best practices for future political campaigns to adopt, such as:
· Maintain one Twitter account per campaign in order to maintain message discipline.
· Engage followers with “calls to action” – specific requests for volunteers, fundraising, voter registration drives, etc to get involved in campaign efforts.
· Link to external content such as news articles, polls, and independent blogs as sources of third-party validation.
The study is available online at http://qorv.is/Gcb. Qorvis Partner Don Goldberg recently interviewed Ruthven for “Focus Washington: Tech View”, which is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0el0yY850hA Ruthven’s Twitter feed – @wyethwire – is available at http://twitter.com/wyethwire.