Hardly a day passes without somebody writing something about advocacy and Twitter. Enter a new study about how many Members of Congress use Twitter.
Congressional Research Service released a new report, Social Networking and Constituent Communications: Member Use of Twitter During a Two-Month Period in the 111th Congress on Twitter usage between August and September 2009 in Congressional offices. The study contains a few golden data points about Twitter usage by Congressional offices:
- 205 Representatives and Senators are registered with Twitter and issued a total of 7,078 tweets during the data collection period.
- 38% of House Members and 39% of Senators registered with Twitter.
- 60% of registered Members were Republican and 40% were Democrats.
- Members of Congress sent an average of 116 tweets per day collectively.
- The content of those Congressional tweets breaks down as 24% state tweets, 23%policy tweets, 14% media tweets, and 14% position-taking tweets.
As you can tell by looking at these numbers, the study does a good job of quantifying how many Congressional offices use Twitter as a communications tool.
However, there are a few other data points that would help me — and a lot of other people working in the field of advocacy — get a handle on how to use Twitter to communicate more effectively with Congressional offices. I would really like to see a survey that goes beyond determining how many. I want to look at factors like trust, value, and motivation. Some of the questions I’m most interested in might include:
- Do you make a point of following constituents on Twitter?
- Do you respond to constituent questions on Twitter?
- How much to do you trust or value the kinds of things you see on Twitter about policy or about your Member?
- Do you use Twitter to monitor what people are saying about current events or politics?
- Do you use Twitter personally in addition to professionally?
For those of us who like to do our own field research, I’ve been using several tools to help follow what is being said by Members of Congress on Twitter — and what people are saying about them.
The first tool is GovLuv, created by Act.ly and the Open Forum Foundation. Enter your address on GovLuv to follow your representatives and see what other people are saying about them. I understand that Congressional offices can also use GoVuv to pinpoint constituent voices on Twitter from everyone else and better handle the noise.
The other tool is Tweet Congress, which also allows you to search for your representative by address. Tweet Congress has some really cool data visualization tools to show how many new followers different Representatives have and the number of Tweeters by party and state.
It’s probably an overstatement to write that as more electeds, constituents, and advocacy groups use tools like Twitter we should expect to see an increase in the level of noise — and spam. Filterting tools that better help advocacy groups mobilize constituents by district and representatives listen more accurately to their constituents say on Twitter will go a long way to cut through the clutter and, more importantly, begin to build online relationships with that begin to take on characteristics of trust and possibly, one day, something that resembles clout. Until then, I’d like to see more qualitative research that goes a few steps further in determine how Congress and its constituents use social tools like Twitter, and how much trust they put into what they read.
