Building Support Through the Personalization of Twitter Messages in a Permanent Campaign
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X231184434 |
| Author | SoRelle W. Gaynor,James G. Gimpel |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
American Politics Research
2023, Vol. 51(5) 570–587
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X231184434
journals.sagepub.com/home/apr
Building Support Through the Personalization
of Twitter Messages in a Permanent Campaign
SoRelle W. Gaynor
1
and James G. Gimpel
2
Abstract
Not all aspects of a campaign are issue-oriented, nor are many voters. A candidate builds mass support largely by appearing
warm, friendly, and likable, not only by propagating their viewpoints on controversial issues. Based on a prominent candidate’s
Twitter accounts and the associated analytics, our research analyzes the online content and reaction to every post across a four-
year period, both before and after a major general election. Twitter’s analytic measuresdemonstrate how a campaign uses social
media to accomplish very different outreach goals. Warm and non-politically oriented messages attract broad support in the
form of audience likes but are not retweeted with as much frequency as messages that are less liked but more politically pointed.
The undeniable popularity of personal, earnest messages underscores the power of the social media platform to present
candidates in an approachable and convivial way, despite the necessity of taking positions on difficult issues.
Keywords
political campaigns, social media, digital strategy, twitter, incumbency
Analysis of campaign political communications on social
media is fast developing, and an important consideration is
how social media advances the personalization of cam-
paigning. Not all aspects of a campaign are issue-oriented,
nor are many voters. A candidate builds mass support not
only by propagating their viewpoints on controversial issues,
but also by appearing warm, friendly, and likable. Using on a
prominent candidate’s Twitter accounts and associated ana-
lytics, our research analyzes the online content and reaction to
every post across a 4-year period, both before and after a
major general election. We find that the campaign uses social
media to accomplish very different outreach goals: Warm and
non-politically oriented messages attract broad support in the
form of audience likes, but do not reach new audiences
through retweets. Conversely, more politically pointed
messages are more likely to be shared via retweet. The un-
deniable popularity of personal, earnest messages under-
scores the power of the social media platform to present
candidates in an approachable and convivial way, despite the
necessity of position-taking on difficult issues.
Social media platforms have gained in popularity and
greatly expanded their following since their introduction in
the early-2000s. Since their inception, social media channels
have gained tremendous popularity among American adults.
By 2021, 69% of American adults reported using Facebook,
40% using Instagram, and 23% logging on to Twitter (Auxier
& Anderson, 2021). Seeing the growing potential for low-
cost mass exposure, political campaigns have responded by
embracing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other
new media. Social media marketing is now a major aspect of
campaign efforts and digital outreach is increasingly ac-
companied by dedicated staff and a robust budget. Twitter in
particular presents opportunity for candidates to reach sup-
porters, as the site allows politicians to respond quickly and
succinctly to current events, share campaign updates or
photos, and engage directly with constituents. Research has
found that Twitter provides fertile ground for political in-
teraction, and political accounts are the most influential and
most followed users of the site.
1
Although Twitter’s growth
rate slowed considerably over where it was prior to the Covid-
19 pandemic, it is still headed upward, and forecast to in-
crease, exceeding 400 million active monthly users in coming
years.
2
How do major candidates with large-scale campaigns use
Twitter, and what kind of audience response do they get from
the strategic choices they make while using the platform?
This paper examines an incumbent candidate’s ongoing use
1
Department of Political Science, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA,
USA
2
Department of Government and Politics, The University of Maryland,
College Park, MD, USA
Corresponding Author:
James G. Gimpel, Department of Government and Politics, The University
of Maryland, 3140 Tydings Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Email: jgimpel@gvpt.umd.edu
of Twitter during the 2018 election cycle and the start of the
2022 cycle. We begin by doing a content analysis of the
candidate’s Twitter communications, examining the political
issues that were emphasized, the propagation of non-political,
non-issue-oriented content, and sentiment coding associated
with the communications, while accounting for the timing of
messages. We then look at available analytics to discern the
audience’s engagement through “liking”and in the form of
“retweeting”or rebroadcasting content.
Studying Social Media in a
Permanent Campaign
The setting for the research and data collection is the
2018 campaign of Greg Abbott for reelection to the Texas
governorship. By approaching the Governor and the campaign
management team, we obtained the entire contents and asso-
ciated Twitter analytic measures for both the Governor’sper-
sonal Twitter account, and the Texans for Greg Abbott
(hereafter TGA) campaign account. Tweets are public, of
course, so accessing them is nothing special, and some of the
analytic measures on accounts other than one’s own are publicly
accessible. But securing the more detailed Twitter analytic data
provided as feedback to the accountholders through their
dashboard requires their credentials and permission.
3
The
campaign provided us access to information for each individual
Tweet for each Twitteraccou nt, including impressions,
4
internal
measures of engagement (such as rates of engagement, URL
clicks, replies, detail expands, or retweets compared across all
content),andwhetheralinkorhashtagwasclickedonbyother
Twitter users. The authors were also given access to campaign
staff who offered important background information about the
Governor’s personal use of Twitter, and the campaign’s digital
strategy. Furthermore, although we are methodologically lim-
ited by the observation of a single candidate, the temporal
variation in the volume and content of Tweets, and the com-
parison between the two accounts we examine (personal and
campaign), has provided us with data allowing for meaningful
application and analysis that can serve as a template for close-up
observation of other candidates and campaigns. Additionally,
the studyof an incumbent officeholder,in both non -electionand
election periods, addresses a still understudied aspect of social
media and political science research.
First elected governor in 2014, Abbott followed the ex-
ample of other officeholders in maintaining a permanent
campaign organization throughout his first term in office
(Vasko & Trilling, 2019;Ornstein and Mann 2000). An
emergent pattern in American politics is for determined in-
cumbents, and other well-positioned candidates, to maintain a
stable political footing by staffing a scaled-back campaign
arm well beyond immediate election periods. Research and
writing on the permanent campaign go back at least to the
early-1980s (Blumenthal, 1980;Ornstein and Mann 2000;
Dulio & Towner, 2010;Joathan & Lilleker, 2020) and
maintaining social media and campaign communications is
now a well-established activity of elected officeholders (Lee,
2016;Gaynor, 2022). Less commonly found is research
focused on the social media strategy of one of these per-
manent campaigns across a lengthy period, in- and out-of-
cycle. Data and observations gathered for this research began
in early-2017 and continued through the 2018 election into
the Governor’s second term, up through mid-2021.
Incumbents’Broad Range of Messaging on
Twitter
Over the course of many decades, political scientists have
placed considerable weight on the importance of incumbency
advantage in the nomination, election, and reelection of
candidates. In this particular case, there are also the chal-
lenges and potentially heavy liabilities that come with being
visibly in charge of a large and complex state. An incumbent
governor is not in the position of a candidate who does not
hold office, able to freely advance or withhold ideas with
wide discretion, perhaps checking episodic polls for the
resonant themes. A sitting governor must respond to natural
disasters, crisis situations, pandemics, heinous crimes, ad-
ministrative failures, and is forced to take positions on un-
comfortable issues that most candidates would rather avoid.
Having both governing and administrative responsibilities,
the range of topics a sitting governor must address is far wider
than that reported for non-incumbent candidates. A broad
range of themes in an incumbent candidate’s messaging is
therefore to be expected.
But there are vital messaging opportunities that Twitter
provides any candidate. First, one of the greatest advan-
tages of social media messaging is the opportunity to
appear personable and relatable. Recent research has
shown that politicians’Twitter-use is not entirely devoted
to highly politicized communications (Mukerjee, et al.,
2022). For incumbents and challengers alike, Twitter is an
advantageous tool for humanizing a politician. First, across
the course of a campaign, a candidate will share partisan
statements, policy stances, and personalized messages
(McGregor 2018). Second, unlike traditional forms of
political media, Twitter allows political elites to speak
directly to constituents and followers (Parmelee &
Bichard, 2011;Stromer-Galley, 2014;Kreiss, 2016;
Meeks, 2016;Bode et al., 2016). Research has found that
politicians utilize Twitter to not only speak to supporters,
but also attract the attention of media (Kreiss, 2016).
Politicians can use Twitter to monitor how content deci-
sions are received by constituents and voters by monitoring
impact engagement statistics gathered for them and re-
ported by Twitter.Researchers and observers also use these
figures as a measure of a campaign’s electoral outreach and
newsworthiness (Lassen & Brown, 2011;McGregor et al.,
2017;Gayo-Avello, 2013).
Gaynor and Gimpel 571
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