United States

Barack Obama’s Twitter account became famous on 9 October 2009 when he tweeted “Humbled”, a one word reaction to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. It turned out he didn’t tweet it himself. Until June 2011 the President had never sent a single tweet. The @BarackObama account is a campaign account managed by his campaign staff and not funded or endorsed by the White House. As the 2012 election campaign is heating up Barack Obama is becoming more active on social networks and he now signs his personal tweets: bo. The Barack Obama account is a pure campaign account, promoting the work of Barack Obama and criticizing the plans of his opponent Mitt Romney. The Barack Obama account is unilaterally followed by 76 other world leaders however he only follows two of them, namely @JensStoltenberg and @MedvedevRussia.

The White House is the third most followed account with almost 3 million followers. For campaign finance reasons the White House does not follow @BarackObama, a campaign account, however since June 2011 the President has been more active on the White House Twitter feed, namely participating in his first White House chat, answering questions from his followers in May 2012. The White House Twitter account is fairly active sending out an average of 10 tweets/day more than half of which are retweets to the other White House accounts. The White House uses Twitter quite creatively. In July 2011 the White House held its first Twitter Town Hall at which President Obama answered 7 of the 160,000 questions addressed to him via Twitter with the hashtag #AskObama. The account consistently uses hashtags like #summerjobsplus, #WHchat, #WHlive, #ObamaonFallon, #Congresstodolist, to name a few. A particularly successful hashtag was #40dollars where the White House asked the question: What does $40 mean to you? This was to encourage discussion about the payroll tax cut being considered before Congress that would take an additional $40 a week out of workers’ paychecks. It started a national conversation by generating over 70,000 tweets. The White House Twitter account also has a sense of humour. To lighten up a White House chat around fiscal policy they ‘rickrolled’ Twitter user @wiggsd sending him a link to a Rick Astley song, which became the White House’s most retweeted tweet.

Since September 2009 the White House tweets important news in Spanish on the @LaCasaBlanca account. The account is followed by the presidents of Colombia and the Dominican Republic, the governments of Panama and Peru and the Spanish prime minister, but only follows the White House. Its most popular tweet is the announcement of President Obama’s speech about “immigration reform in El Paso”, inviting its followers to share their views using the hashtag #immigration.