President-elect Donald Trump strategically used Twitter as his primary vehicle in his campaign to the white house. He boasts 12.9 million followers on Twitter- compared with Clinton’s 10.2 million- and has provided his followers with a constant stream of blunt commentary, insults, and inflammatory remarks that have grabbed national headlines over and over again(Carey). Trump’s focus on Twitter campaigning rather than traditional television advertising as Clinton did paid off as he spent significantly less than his opponent throughout the campaign. Donald Trump spent 932.3 million dollars on his political campaign in total in comparison with Clinton’s whopping 1.4 billion (Federal Election Commission Findings). The lack of expenditure contributed to the narrative that Trump, unlike Clinton, is not part of the establishment.
Donald Trump masterfully used social media, specifically Twitter, in which he posted controversial 140 character remarks guaranteed to grab headlines. Trump masterfully capitalized on the 140 word limits to create short, but memorable phrases for each of his opponents that stuck in the electorate’s mind.
Some of Trump’s pet names include: “Crooked Hillary”, “Low-Energy Jeb”, “Little Marco”, and “Lyin’ Ted” (Leibovich). Trump doesn’t just stop at his opponents, but even insults media directly repeatedly using the phrase the “Failing New York Times.”
While Hillary Clinton’s campaign and speeches were perfectly polished by focus groups and strategists alike, when Donald Trump was asked whether or not he used focus groups he responded by putting his thumb to the front of his forehead and saying, “right here”(Leibovich). Rather than using focus groups, Trump will test a nickname at his numerous rallies around the country to feel out which sticks before translating it into a tweet. His use of simple terms and repeating monikers like “Crooked, Crooked Hillary” over and over may have brushed some of us as less than intelligent, but, in fact, the strategy forged results as a wider audience could understand his rhetoric and feel as though they were talking to someone “like them.”
The 2016 election was such a shock to Americans, and perhaps even to PEOTUS Trump himself, because national polls showed Hillary Clinton winning by wide margins; the failure of polls necessitates new methods for mass data collection of voter’s preferences. One research study analyzed over 100,000 Twitter mentioning parties or politicians prior to the German federal election in 2009 and “found that Twitter is indeed used as a platform for political deliberation”(Tumasjan et. al.). This comes as no surprise to the millennial generation that has grown up using Twitter as a platform to discuss and debate politics and daily news. The study found that “the mere number of tweets reflect voter preferences and comes close to traditional election polls, while the sentiment of Twitter messages closely corresponds to political programs, candidate profiles, and evidence from the media coverage of the campaign trail” (Tumasjan et. al.). A more recent study in January 2016 found that 44% of US adults report having learned about the 2016 presidential election in the past week from social media, outpacing both local and national print newspaper” (Pew Research Center). There is a trend towards information gathering online rather than through traditional media. Given the nature of social media, analysts are therefore able to see and use mentions, follows, and retweets in order to gauge voter preferences in an unprecedented manner. In other words, analysts will soon be using Twitter as a reliable tool to help predict and monitor voters and their preferences.
In fact, the study concluded that tweets that mention political parties can be considered a “plausible reflection of the vote share and its predictive power” is substantial. In the past, critics believed that because Twitter had no currency or pricing mechanism that could be properly analyzed in big data; however, Tumasjan’s study found quite the contrary: “Twitter can be seen as a valid real-time indicator…the size of the followership and the rate of re-tweets may represent the Twittersphere “currency” and provide it with its own kind of pricing mechanism” (Tumasjan et. al.). It must be said that the study also mentions that the majority of political debates are dominated by only a small amount of users: “only 4% of all users accounted for more than 40% of the messages”(Tumasjan et. al.). Nonetheless, the predictive power of Twitter is a sleeping giant for future predictions of major elections.
When we take Tumasjan’s study and apply their conclusion to the 2016 election it becomes clear that Twitter would have been able to predict the nomination of Donald Trump. Even though Sanders and Clinton posted as frequently as Trump did on social media sites, Donald Trump’s posts garnered much more attention from users. The Pew Research Center released a study that shows that the “public responded to Donald Trump’s social media updates more frequently on average than to either of the other candidate’s posts” (Pew Research Center). For some perspective, a tweet by Donald Trump was retweeted almost “6,000 times on average compared with just 1,500 for Clinton and almost 2,500 for Sanders” (Pew Research Center). Donald Trump’s following on Twitter and Facebook dwarfed that of Hillary Clinton’s. Trump has over 9 million followers on his official Facebook page which is more than double that of Hillary Clinton’s at the height of her campaign (Pew Reesearch Center)
The Pew Research Center found in their study another interesting tidbit that may have contributed to Donald Trump’s nomination: while Clinton retweets her own campaign, Donald Trump primarily retweets the public. This has been met with its share of criticism. Trump has been found to have spread fake news stories propagated by regular twitter users with no journalistic backgrounds. However, because “Trump was most likely to retweet the public,” the public felt that they had more of a direct connection to their candidate, thus generating more emotions for the campaign. Trump’s “unique engagement with the public stands apart not just from other 2016 candidates but also from past presidential campaigns” (Pew Research Center). Donald Trump utilized the platform in a way that no other politician ever has through directly engaging the public and his constituents, sometimes until the early hours of the morning. Whatever your opinion is of Donald Trump, his strategic use of social networking sites is nothing less than genius and likely led to him being nominated to be the 45th President of the United States of America.