Over the past few years, Congress has begun to embrace the power of social media to communicate with the public. Twitter, the microblogging service, has been one of the main platform used by members of Congress.

FHDC’s Mark Senak, proprietor of Eye on FDA, recently analyzed the growth of Twitter on Capitol Hill in a new white paper, entitled “Twongress – the Power of Twitter in Congress.”

Click here to view and download the white paper.

In his analysis, Mark found a few interesting trends:

• There are 89 Republicans using Twitter and 32 Democrats.
• House Republicans are particularly active on Twitter, sending out 29,162 Tweets through January 3, 2010
• Over the same time period, House Democrats sent out 5,503

While some members of Congress have harnessed the power of Twitter, most have not. As Mark points out:

“There has been little effort to develop the resource to engage communities by classifying their tweets by topic for their constituencies through the use of hashtags. For example, one could organize one’s tweets under hashtags for “taxes” or even by party – such as”DEMHCR” for Democratic member views on health care reform. Those tweets could be aggregated at Web sites, and twitter could drive traffic to those Web sites. Without such strategic efforts by either individuals in Congress or by the parties, the primary use of Twitter by Congress is merely as a message platform to push out points direct to waiting constituencies.”

For more analysis, make sure to download the full report. Also, check out the New York Times’ Bernie Becker’s article on the report, posted to The Caucus blog.

More later.

January 14th, 2010 by Craig Paridy | No Comments
Tags: Capitol Hill · Congress · Eye on FDA · Mark Senak · Twitter · Twongress