The Obama campaign is about to get a lot more aggressive in its use of Facebook and Twitter to help bolster the incumbent candidate’s efforts for reelection. One of the most interesting changes to the way that the staff handles the social media updates is that President Barack Obama will begin tweeting (on occasion) from the @BarackObama account personally.
The announcement was made in a blog post on the Barack Obama 2012 campaign site.
Obama for America staff will now be managing both accounts, posting daily updates from the campaign trail, from Washington, and everywhere in between. You’ll be hearing from President Obama regularly, too; on Twitter, tweets from the President will be signed “-BO.”
In addition to the more frequent Twitter updates, the staff will also be more frequently updating the President’s Facebook page. The staff say that they are going to be using the social networks not only to report on what the President is doing, but also to ask constituents for their feedback and ideas. The staff says that they may even be retweeting your messages to the Presidential twitter account as well.
President Obama has widely been credited as a technologically savvy candidate who was elected in part because of his aggressive stance towards using the internet and technology to reach voters.
Twitter and Facebook are two of the largest ways that people share opinions online and it would be foolish for any future candidate to ignore these platforms.
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Do you think that every candidate from this point on will have to make an effort to communicate via social networks, or is it still just for the tech savvy? What about President Obama, do you think that using Twitter and Facebook to communicate directly with voters is a valuable use of his time?
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