Obama’s Twitter Mobilization Nets -40k Followers

I felt compelled to share this multiple friends have dubbed me ‘The Twitter Police’ for my affinity in pointing out people’s sometimes obnoxious retweeting or spammy habits on the social networking site. Here is some empirical evidence to prove I am not ranting for no reason, at least not on this extremely trivial issue.

In an effort to mobilize Twitter users to call for #compromise in the Debt Ceiling debate, the @BarackObama account let out a barrage of tweets listing Republican registered Congressional representatives with Twitter accounts that the US populace should encourage to reach a compromise.

Of course, for two houses of government x 50 states x 140-character limit means, a lot of tweeting. It is estimated that the @BarackObama account lost about 40,000 followers during that time-frame. Yes, I’m sure some of them are following again too, I can concede that. Hilariously, it also served as a presidential #followfriday as many Republican representatives thanked the White House for new followers.

via SFExaminer

I am not here to suggest that Twitter followers is a solid metric for Presidential approval, instead — with a large sample size, the effects of spamming become much easier to measure.

For all of you expecting me to leverage this to explain anything beyond something as irrelevant as a Twitter follower account, nice try…but at least they didn’t rickroll us again

Editor’s Note: Any ‘promoters’ reading this site, sending out a ton of Facebook Event Invites and posting it to your wall every four hours probably doesn’t work well either.