But according to University of Michigan researchers, whose findings were presented on July 19 at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Barcelona, Spain, plenty of politicians are using this social medium as part of their campaign strategy.

They studied the use of Twitter by U.S. House, U.S. Senate and gubernatorial candidates during the 2010 midterm elections, analyzing more than 460,000 tweets — three years’ worth — from 687 candidates.

One of the study’s authors, associate professor in the U-M School of Information Lada Adamic, said she and her fellow researchers determined that during this campaign season, Republicans and Tea Party members proved to be more effective than Democrats in utilizing Twitter to direct attention to their fellow party members and reaffirm each other’s messages.

“What we observe is that (conservatives) tend to mention one another more often and retweet each other’s content, and they also tend to use a more coherent set of hashtags and terms in general,” Adamic said.

Higgins said conservatives frequently could be found tweeting because many of them were running for office for the first time and were little-known among the public.

“A lot of them were really fighting for their position,” he said.
By observing who is following who and who is mentioning who on the website, the study found Twitter also can be used to forecast election outcome fairly accurately.

Twitter is a cheap and fairly effective way for politicians to campaign, Adamic said.

Candidates simply can click a button to tweet, and their message begins to spread, said social relations and policy sophomore Emily Bank, who is the MSU College Democrats director of communications.

“It gets information out to the public that they need to know,” she said. “People don’t even get newspapers anymore, so whatever is online can get to the public easier, faster and more efficiently.”

Seeing President Barack Obama’s success in using social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook during his 2008 election campaign to recruit volunteers and collect donations inspired other candidates, Higgins said.

“To see the huge boom, I think a lot of people on both sides of the aisle and independents took to that,” he said. “Twitter has exploded with political news and words (directly) from the politicians mouths.”

Higgins said Twitter is a brilliant way for politicians to communicate. MSU College Republicans maintains a Twitter account, as does almost every one of the group’s members, he said.

MSU College Democrats also has a Twitter account, which Banks said members sometimes use to tweet live during a speech or debate.
And with such use of the social media site, Twitter’s relevance only will increase, Adamic said.

“Because our attention and use and content consumption is increasingly (geared toward social media), it’s still an increasing trend and I think it will become more important,” she said.