Have you ever wondered how politicians use Twitter? Who are the most active politicians? Who do they follow, and who follows them? Who are the political strategists and media personalities that politicians follow? And within the political Twittersphere, who follows the most people, and who follows them?
To answer these questions, Sysomos took a deep look at how Twitter is emerging as a new and powerful political tool. We identified 168 of the most active political voices in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. We then divided the 168 accounts into three groups:
- Group 1 – Politicians
- Group 2 – Political strategists, bloggers and media personalities
- Group 3 – News organizations that cover politics
Here is the list of top users, ordered by the number of followers they have within the political Twittersphere:
Here are some of the highlights, while here’s the complete report.
- Overall, U.S. President Barack Obama (@barackobama) is the most popular politician (Group 1) with 2.24 million followers. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (@schwarzenegger) is the most popular among the 168 members of the political Twittersphere with 68 followers, while President Obama is followed by 56 out of 168.
- Overall, ABC News’ Chief Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos (@gstephanopoulos) is the most followed media personality (Group 2). Nansen Malin (@nansen), a blogger who’s on the Republican Party’s Executive Board in Washington State, has the most followers among group 2 members of the political Twittersphere.
- CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) is the most followed news source (Group 3) overall, while the L.A. Times’ Top of the Ticket (@latimestot) is the most followed among the political Twittersphere.
- Within the political Twittersphere, George Stephanopoulos is followed by the most politicians; Virginia senator Mark Warner (@markwarner) is followed by the most media personalities; while MSNBC cartoonist Darly Cagle (@dcagle) is followed by the most news organizations.
Finally, here is a visual representation of who follows whom:
This is the third Twitter report done by Sysomos. In June, we published our “Inside Twitter” report that documented Twitter’s growth and how people were using it. In August, we looked at Twitter’s most active users – the 5% of users who account for 75% of all activity.
Continue reading the complete report.
Tags: barack obama, politicians, politics, Social Media, sysomos, twitter
[...] enough I just received an email highlighting another study of the political Twittersphere by Sysomos…curious because I was emailed at my other blog which had nothing about the political [...]
I did a far smaller study of British politicians, looking not only at immediate followers, but also at the network as a whole:
http://www.davidstuart.co.uk/blog/2009/10/twitter-network-analysis-tweetminster/
I think it’s also important to take into consideration a Twitterer’s number of friends and updates when looking at their number of followers, they are generally correlated:
http://www.davidstuart.co.uk/blog/2009/09/how-many-twitter-followers-should-you-have/
@David thanks for sharing the links, the network analysis of british politicians looks interesting.
In our previous report (http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/) we also discovered the same correlation between followers and friends/updates.