I was intrigued to read an article on Politico “For GOP, revenge is tweet“,that talked about the greater number of Republicans who were tweeting vs. Democrats. According to the article, the Congressional Research Service found that over two weeklong periods in July and August, Republicans posted 932 tweets vs. 235 for Democrats. Apparently the 140 character Twitter limit lends itself to the well thought out positions of America’s opposition party.
I was curious to see how our Congressional Delegation was doing when it came to the use of Twitter and the number of tweets they’ve generated since being on Twitter. If you do a search at TweetCongress, a database of Congressional Members on Twitter under Wisconsin, I was only able to find Senator Russ Feingold (D). If you do a further search on the site by Congressional name, I found two additional members – Representatives Gwen Moore (D) and Paul Ryan (D). I found it curious that neither member were tagged with Wisconsin as part of their profile, which would make the search more effective given that they represent districts in the state. I know that there are others in the Wisconsin Congressional delegation that are on Twitter, so I went to the search engine at Twitter to find them. The two additional people that I found were Representatives Tammy Baldwin (D) and Representative Ron Kind (D).
Here’s the information on their Twitter accounts and where you can go to follow them if you are on Twitter:
Democrats
- @russfeingold – 7,098 followers, 4,869 following, 51 tweets
- @repgwenmoore – 499 followers, 8 following, 7 tweets
- @RepTammyBaldwin – 107 followers, 0 following, 11 tweets
- @CongressmanKind – 35 followers, 13 following, 7 tweets
Republicans
- @reppaulryan – 5730 followers, 1 following, 190 tweets
I was unable to find Twitter user names for Representatives Sensenbrenner (R), Petri (R) or Kagen (D). I was also unable to find Senator Herb Kohl (D) on Twitter. There was an unofficial Twitter name registered for David Obey (D) @davidobey, with 8 followers, no following and 1 tweet.
Looking at our Congressional delegation, the number of Dem Representatives on Twitter exceeds the Republicans there. However, it looks like Rep. Paul Ryan is ahead in the number of tweets and second among our delegation in the number of followers. However, he and others in the WI Congressional delegation should realize that Twitter is about having a “conversation” and that a conversation does not take place when you are only following 1 person (Ryan) or nobody (Baldwin).
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