Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:43 am
Something strange is going on with Mitt Romney’s Twitter account. It looks like the Romney campaign is using the Colorado shooting as a distraction to hide their buying 100,000 new Twitter followers.
140ELECT has been keeping an eye on this and providing the data behind Romney’s suspect surge, “Romney was gaining around 3000-4000 new followers per day for the past month. Yesterday he acquired 23,926 new followers and is climbing well over 50,000 today. The hourly stats make it pretty clear where this began.”
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At 4 PM on Friday, Romney experienced a sudden rise in followers. This is bizarre because hours earlier in the day, the candidate had pulled himself off of the campaign trail. Mitt Romney is doing absolutely nothing right now, yet his number of Twitter followers continues to skyrocket.
Mitt Romney’s Twitter account gained 23, 926 followers yesterday. As of 2 PM ET, Romney has more than tripled that total with 75,912 new followers. In some of these hours, the official Romney account has only had 700 mentions and 15 retweets, yet tens of thousands of, ” new people” are now following him.
Romney’s previous best day ever was June 28 when he gained 9,160 new followers. Before this Romney’s best day was April 12, when he gained 6,396 followers. Romney has seen an eightfold increase over his previous best day at a time when the candidate is not campaigning, and the nation’s attention is turned towards the Colorado shooting.
This isn’t even the first time that Romney has purchased Twitter followers. In August 2011, Peek You analyzed the Twitter accounts of all of the Republican presidential contenders, and found that only 26% of Mitt Romney’s followers were real people.
The initial data on tweets and mentions of the Romney account isn’t matching up with an account that has gotten 100,000 new followers in day. Romney gained over 8,000 new followers at 1 PM today, but only had 1,000 mentions and 11 retweets.
Romney now has 777, 835 followers. If the 26% human ratio holds true, Mitt Romney’s actual real human followers total a little over 200,000. For the record, President Obama’s campaign account has over 17,700,000 followers.
It appears that the Romney campaign thought that the Colorado shooting was the perfect time to go on a Twitter follower buying spree. With the media all covering the horrible shooting, they assumed no one would notice if they added 100,000 new Twitter followers in a day, but they were wrong.
No explanation can be found in the news cycle for why a candidate that is not even campaigning has seen such a dramatic spike in his number of Twitter followers.
It is possible that 100,000 people woke up yesterday and today, and decided that now would be a great time to start following Mitt Romney.
But the likely truth is just like the awkward and unpopular rich kid that he is, it looks like Mitt Romney is having to buy his friends on Twitter.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
