In the next day or so I’ll be publishing a table that compares the activity of major-party candidates on Twitter. What leaps out in a big way is Hillary Clinton’s very sparing use of the service. That behavior, combined with a huge number of followers, gives remarkable traction to her participation. It’s become a story in itself.
Caitlin Huey-Burns explored this in an article, Hillary Clinton’s Twitter Campaign, at Real Clear Politics. The observation was picked up by US News and World Report’s Robert Schlesinger in an article titled No Coronation, which was largely about efforts within the GOP to goad Clinton into higher public interaction.
When traction is calculated as the number of followers divided by the number of tweets, Clinton dominates the field. More importantly, she gets a remarkable number of retweets — often in the thousands — for each of her originals. At the other end of the spectrum some candidates are effectively just spinning their wheels, putting out massive numbers of tweets per follower, with only handfuls of retweets to show for it.