Tweeting politicians: An analysis of the usage of a micro blogging system

Abstract

Political communication via social media is getting more and more important. Besides social websites like Facebook and the video platforms like Youtube, microblogging systems have been increasingly used by politicians as communication tools. Since its introduction in 2007, Twitter has become the leading microblogging system. Today it is used by common people and any kind of celebrity whether they are in the show business, in sports or in any other domain. Twitter is also used by politicians to communicate with their voters. Hence, the objective of our paper is to analyze how elected politicians, i. e. members of parliaments, exploit Twitter in three different countries-namely Australia, Germany and the U.S. For our study, we collected data from more than 1,400 politicians of these countries, in particular their almost one million tweets. Our research gives an insight into the usage of Twitter in politics and discloses areas where the usage of Twitter by parliamentarians, differs between Australia, Germany and the U.S.