Building Support Through the Personalization of Twitter Messages in a Permanent Campaign

Not all aspects of a campaign are issue-oriented, nor are many voters. A candidate builds mass support largely by appearing warm, friendly, and likable, not only by propagating their viewpoints on controversial issues. Based on a prominent candidate’s Twitter accounts and the associated analytics, our research analyzes the online content and reaction to every post across a four-year period, both before and after a major general election. Twitter’s analytic measures demonstrate how a campaign uses social media to accomplish very different outreach goals. Warm and non-politically oriented messages attract broad support in the form of audience likes but are not retweeted with as much frequency as messages that are less liked but more politically pointed. The undeniable popularity of personal, earnest messages underscores the power of the social media platform to present candidates in an approachable and convivial way, despite the necessity of taking positions on difficult issues.