Political Organizations and the Magic of Retweeting

Political organization is about informing and mobilizing. Common to both is communcation. The 'bedrock' of political organization is communication.

The last revolution in communication that poltical organizations put to work was email. Current arrangements for email required companies to agree on a standard for exchanging data so there would be no corporate barriers to the free flow of messages. It required the development of networks that were sufficient to carry the load. It required email becoming ubiquitous. There was a time before email, but it would be very hard today to find people you could not reach with an email address. And it required computers that could handle very large collections of email addresses to make mass mailings selected from the database cheap enough for targeted mailings to become inexpensive.

Since hardly a day passes without several emails from candidates or political groups in my email inbox it appears that political organizations have mastered email communication.

But there is a new communcation revolution. Call it new media. Call it Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. Whatever you call it electronic communiciation is in the middle of taking a big step beyond email. According to an April report from the Pew Foundation 80% of American adults now use the internet. (Pew, 2012) That is not quite ubiquitous nor are there standards that let communication flow freely from one corporate giant to another. But both are coming.

Where are political organizations in this next communication revolution?

I will look at their use of Twitter for communication. Twitter has several advantages for organizational communication. It is very cheap. Since it is limited to 140 characters it is surely more likely to be read than the much longer email messages that take time to 'process' unless the processing is dumping them in the trash. It is public communication. Twitter users may well 'run into' your communication as well as the messages finding their way to people who follow you. Constructing the 'list' is cost effective. People sign up.

To examine the use of Twitter by political organizations I needed a list of organizations, and Dave Karpf adivised me on constructing the list. The list is two single purpose organizations: The National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club. Two organizations with a broader commission: National Review and ThinkProgress. Two organizations that make clear the inadequacies of news media were selected: Newsbusters and MediaMatters. And finally I took MoveOn as one of the most successful of the organizations that specialize in email communication. You will note that one of the selection criteria was partisanship. A left and right organization was chosen for each of the three pairs.

All seven of the organizations have a Twitter account. As of May 6, 2012 the accounts listed these activities. These numbers change daily and will be different after that date. In looking at the numbers one should remember that Twitter was only established in 2006 and did not 'get out of' the geek world until the fall of 2009 when the number of messages per day reached 50 million. So this is a new resource -- about 2.5 years at this point.

The number of Twitter messages ranges from 21,450 for NewsBusters to 3,389 for The National Review. Five of the seven have posted more than 10,000 messages. The number of followers is also impressive. Followers are people who have signed up to receive the Twitter messages posted by the individual or group. ThinkProgress leads with 123,109, and The National Review has the smallest number, which is 26,842. When these organizations post a Twitter message it is available to a substantial number of people. By looking at these numbers it seems clear that they think of Twitter as broadcast. They are sending communication to people who have signed up for it. With the exception of NewsBusters they are not 'taking in' much communication.

The number of followers is large. However, they are not as large as a few other political organizations. @BarackObama has 15,515,779 followers as of May 16, 2012 and the number grows daily. He is 'king' of politics on Twitter. No other political figure or organization is close.The New York Times has 5,066,530 followers. The Washington Post has 984,958 followers. Well, the point is there are a few political organizations that have many more followers than the rest. And there are some individuals communicating on Twitter whose followers number in the tens of thousands.

The magic of retweeting: so, what is the retweeting? Retweeting is a convention developed by Twitter users very early in its existence and now has become a feature built into the system. A retweet is an attributed quotation. I read a message and I would like to share it with others. So I add RT @[original username] to the front of the message and post it to my account. Then it is available to all of the people who follow me. They know the originator of the message, which is the user name following RT @. They see that I posted the message. They know the originator, they know who passed it along which gives them some basis for assessing the credibility of the message they are reading.

What is the magic? Imagine -- MediaMatters posts a message to Twitter. It is now available to 60K persons. If that is the end of it then 60K is the reach of their message. But followers of MediaMatters have some number -- from 0 to thousands -- of followers themselves. What if half of the 60K retweeted the message. Suddenly there is an explosion of the message as it reaches much more widely than the original 60K.

The questions are: 1) how many retweets are being posted for each organization? and 2) how many followers do the people posting retweets have? With that I can compute reach.

I collected the Twitter messages that retweeted each of the organizations tweets beginning on March 6 and running through March 15; a ten day collection. I used a desktop program, Achivist, that checks the Twitter database every five minutes for messages containing the search term. Twitter will provide no more than 1,500 'answers' to a query. Given the numbers collected it is clear that I got them all. At no point was the search overwhelmed by needing to capture more than 1,500 messages for any five minute period.

On March 9 Obama announced that he now supported marriage equality. That day and the following one were very busy days for Twitter messaging. That had more impact on some of the organizations than on others. But before examining that impact I want to present the totals.

I collected the messages posted by each organization for the 10 days from their Twitter profile. The first observation is that ThinkProgress is far ahead of the other organizations.They posted 2K messages to Twitter in the 10 days. MediaMatters, NewsBusters, and Sierra Club posted more than a thousand but less than two thousand. And MoveOn, The National Rifle Association, and the National Review posted fewer than a thousand. But this was only 10 days. Two thousand messages in 10 days is 200 per day. Somebody was very busy writing. And 272 messages for the 10 days is 27 per day. ThinkProgress is farther ahead of the others in the retweeting of their messages. I collected 46,821 retweets of ThinkProgress tweets with a whopping ratio of retweets to tweets of 22.8 for the 10 days. Second, was MediaMatters with only 4,602 and a ratio of 3.6 retweets to tweets for the 10 days. And the National Review again brought up the bottom with only 421 retweets of their messages. But the Sierra Club had the lowest ratio of retweets to tweets with only 0.6. Their supporters were not retweeters.

The next question is the number of followers of the people retweeting. I used an online service, TweetTronics, to collect the data and calculate the average number of followers for these retweets. Followers of the Sierra Club and MediaMatters have themselves the most followers with 2066 and 1863 respectively. NewsBusters, ThinkProgress and the National Rifle Association followers have the fewest followers at approximately a thousand.

The result: In a 10 day period retweets of ThinkProgress' tweets reached 47 million followers, which was computed by multiplying the number of retweets collected times the average number of followers. Reach 47 million, 8.6 million, 4.4 million 1.8 million, 1.5 million, and 750 thousand. Those are very big numbers. They certainly rival 30 seconds on TV, and they cost a lot less.

Back to the imagine if: Imagine if one-half of the followers of MediaMatters retweeted a MediaMatters tweet. The original message found its way to 60K followers. MediaMatter followers have, on average, 1863 followers. 30 thousand retweeters multiplied by 1863 per follower is 55,890,000. Why would MediaMatters not want that reach for its messages? Why are they limited to 8.5 million spread across 1293 tweets? The math for ThinkProgress is simpler since the average number of followers is one thousand. Half of their followers is 61 thousand. Add three digits and you get 61,000,000. With more retweeting the reach of the messages of these organizations could be dramatically greater.

The most impressive difference between ThinkProgress and the other organizations is the ratio of people retweeting to followers of the organization.

For ThinkProgress there are almost a third as many retweeters as followers of the organization. Next on this dimension is Newsbusters where the ratio is .09. The National Rifle Association, the National Review, and the Sierra Club have a very small number of retweeters compared to the followers of the organization. The standard lingo for this is engagement. Engagement of ThinkProgress followers is far superior to that of the other political organizations.

Reach: ThinkProgress is far in front of the other organizations. Engagement: ThinkProgress is far in front of the other organizations. They have begun to figure out these new media. The other organizations have not achieved very impressive performance. They are still doing email with the minor adaptations of length and the way the message travels.

Two points remain:

One, the average number of followers of people using Twitter is in 2011 was 115. (Pring, 1/11/2012) The average number of followers of persons retweeting the tweets of these organizations is much greater than 115. What should be made of this difference? In Sarah Palin did what? The importance of redundancy I looked at another political episode and found the number of followers of people reweeting about it was in the neighborhood of one thousand. (Boynton, 3/16/2010) Three hundred and sixty-seven posted a message about Sarah Palin and the total number of followers was 366,636. I have an extensive collection of Twitter messages about the Republican candidates for the nomination in 2011 and 2012. The average number of followers is higher than one thousand in these data because they include tweets from major media sources such as The New York Times. That raises the average substantially. These are three separate data collections in which the number of followers is near to or above one thousand on average. One must conclude that people tweeting about U.S. politics have far more followers than the average.

For most Twitter users Twitter is read only. They do not have many followers. They do not tweet or retweet. But ThinkProgress seems to have figured out a way to energize their followers well beyond 'average.'

Two, the impact of the president's announcement about supporting marriage equality. For ThinkProgress the range of retweets per day is 2,644 to 11,840. Eight of the days the number of retweets range between 2,644 and 4345. It is the 8th and 9th of the month that see the spike. On the 8th there were 7,009 retweets and on the 9th there were 11,830. If impose the mean for the eight days into the values for the 8th and 9th the total is 34,977 instead of 46,821. The president's announcement generated 11,000 retweets for ThinkProgress. None of the other six timelines experienced that kind of spike. Retweets for NewsBusters and the National Rifle Association were even down on the 9th.

Conclusion: Retweeting is standard practice in the use of Twitter for political communication. Roughly 40 percent of the hundreds of millions of Twitter messages I have collected are retweets. There is no mystery about retweeting among the politically active. Ordinarily it is the message of an individual that is retweeted, and it become tens or, sometimes, hundreds of retweets. And the messages are seen by the followers of the people retweeting.

Political organizations are organizers of communication. You follow them because of what you expect from them. They have credibility. They have a point of view that leads you to follow them whether because you agree or disagree with their point of view. I am confident that each of the seven organizations has a well developed strategy for communication via email. But there is no retweeting in email. So it appears that only ThinkProgress has moved beyond an email strategy to one that effectively calls on followers to spread the word. In their case to the tens of millions.

References

G. R. Boynton (3/16/2010) Sarah Palin did what? The importance of redundancy

Pew Foundation (4/13/2012) Digital differences

Pring, Cara (1/11/2012) 100 social media statistics for 2012

© G. R. Boynton, May 17, 2012