Twitter use by three political leaders: an exploratory analysis
| Published date | 03 August 2012 |
| Pages | 587-603 |
| Date | 03 August 2012 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521211254086 |
| Author | Noa Aharony |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Twitter use by three political
leaders: an exploratory analysis
Noa Aharony
Department of Information Science, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
Abstract
Purpose – This study aims to understand how three political leaders – the Prime Minister of Israel,
Benjamin Netanyahu; the Prime Minister of Britain, David Cameron; and the President of the United
States of America, Barack Obama – communicate through Twitter.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents an analysis of tweets produced between
August and October 2010 by three political leaders, using statistical descriptive analysis and content
analysis.
Findings – The research shows that the US President tweets more than the other leaders, with the
British Prime Minister tweeting the least, and that all three leaders use Twitter for both transparency
and outreach.
Originality/value – As Twitter has become widespread over the last few years, and several studies
have focused on Twitter and its impact on different sectors in our society, it is interesting to focus on
political leaders’ use of Twitter.
Keywords Twitter, Politicalleaders, Exploratory analysis,Social networking sites, Communication
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Microblogging, a recent phenomenon in online social networks, has become
widespread over the last few years. Microblogging is the latest version of blogging,
where messages (called tweets), usually no longer than 140 characters, are posted
instantly (Reinhardt et al., 2009). Microblogging is a novel form of communication
(Zhao and Rosson, 2009); it involves posting updates, ideas, or simply quick
notifications, thus providing a flexible platform for communication (Ebner and
Schiefner, 2008).
Problem statement
As microblogging becomes widespread in our information world, and more and more
people use it for various purposes, it becomes worthwhile to examine this phenomenon
in the political arena. This study aims to understand how three political leaders –
Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu; Prime Minister of Britain, David
Cameron; and President of the United States of America, Barack Obama –
communicate through Twitter. However it should be noted that even though the
current study examines these political leaders’ Twitter accounts, it is possible that they
did not tweet personally: their secretaries or other trusted people may be tweeting on
their behalf. The research focuses on the communication flowing from the leaders to
the public and not on how the public uses this communication back to the leaders.
Although some studies have focused on Twitter and its impact on different sectors
in our society, no academic research has so far been conducted focusing on political
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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Twitter use by
three political
leaders
587
Received 25 November 2010
Accepted 12 September
2011
Online Information Review
Vol. 36 No. 4, 2012
pp. 587-603
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/14684521211254086
leaders’ use of Twitter. This study aims to describe and classify the tweets from those
three political leaders, in order to understand their microblogging patterns of use.
The two primary research questions are:
(1) Do the leaders differ regarding their number of tweets?
(2) Does the content of the tweets from the three leaders differ?
Twitter
The most popular microblogging service, Twitter, with approximately 300 million
members in May 2011 (Taylor, 2011) was launched on 13 July 2006 (Jansen et al., 2009)
and has since expanded considerably (Bausch and McGiboney, 2008; Golbeck et al.,
2010; Hughes and Palen, 2009; Java et al., 2007). According to Freiert (2008) American
users tend to be young and male.
Twitter’s short posts, called tweets, focus on small events happening in users’ daily
lives and work activities, thus enabling them to share updates with friends, family, and
co-workers (McFedries, 2007). Each user has a Twitter page on which all their updates
are aggregated in a single list. When the brief message is posted, it cannot be edited,
and only the author can delete it. The tweets are not only presented on the user’s page,
but can be delivered to followers by instant messaging (IM), short message service
(SMS), really simple syndication (RSS), e-mail, or other social networking platforms.
On Twitter, a “user” is a person or a system that posts a tweet or a message on
Twitter, and is usually identified by a unique user name. When the user chooses to
“follow” another user, a friend-follower relationship is established. In other words if
user A agrees to receive all tweets from user B, then B is considered a friend of
A. Conversely when A adds B as a friend, from B’s point of view, A becomes a follower
of B. All tweets posted by B are now received by A; the converse need not be true for A,
as A might not be a friend of B. This shows that there is an asymmetrical relationship
between friends and followers among Twitter users. In addition Twitter imposes a
limit of 2,000 friends per user, but there is no limit to the number of followers a user can
have.
Twitter also has its own abbreviations, such as “RT” (retweet), which means that a
previous tweet is being sent again by a user, and “DM” which refers to a direct message
from one user to another. Tweets are generally directed towards a general audience,
but if the user wants to direct a tweet to another user or send it as a response to an
earlier tweet, they add the “@” symbol to the intended user’s name. Another
interesting characteristic is the hash symbol “#” referred to as a hashtag. When a user
assigns a hashtag in a tweet, for example #twitter, it means that the tweet is related to
a certain topic (Sankaranarayanan et al., 2009).
Among the various studies of Twitter, several explore Twitter as a unique
phenomenon. For example Java et al. (2007) attempted to understand users’ intentions
and the community structure in Twitter, presenting a brief taxonomy of users’
intentions:
.Daily chatter: the largest and most common use of Twitter, which includes tweets
about daily routine and people’s current activities.
.Conversations: because there is no direct way to comment or reply to friends’
posts, users began using the @ symbol followed by a username for replies, and
thus conversations were established.
OIR
36,4
588
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