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The use of social media in political campaigns has become commonplace since Barack Obama used Facebook and Twitter extensively to raise funds for his campaign in 2008. Some individuals attributed Obama's success in 2008 to his social networking ability (Williams and Gulati 2008). As Tumasjan et al. (2010) describe, "after the rise of candidate websites in 1996, e-mail in 1998 (the Jesse Ventura campaign), online fund-raising in 2000 (the John McCain campaign), and blogs in 2004 (the Howard Dean campaign; Gueorguieva 2007), Twitter has become a legitimate communication channel in the political arena as a result of the 2008 campaign" ( 178).
Twitter, which began in 2006, has become a valuable tool for politicians to communicate with their followers. For those politicians who do not have large sums of money to spend on campaign commercials, tweeting allows them to discuss their political agenda in 140 characters or less for free. Tweets are highly visible on the politician's message board and can be linked to other boards as well through the use of hashtags and re-tweets. For politicians wanting to reach out to young voters, Twitter is the ideal platform because those who use Twitter on a daily basis tend to be under 30 years old (Pew Research Center 2013).
In the past few years, some researchers have turned to Twitter to get a sense of the political mood of the electorate (Pear Analytics 2009; Skemp 2009; Tumasjan et al. 2010). Few have examined how politicians use this social networking site; those who have examined politician tweets have limited their research (e.g., taking a small sample of senators or governors or selected the tweets when there were few Twitter users) (Glassman, Straus, and Shogan 2010; Golbeck, Grimes, and Rogers 2010; Lassen and Brown 2011).
This article examines how House candidates used Twitter in the 2012 campaign. A content analysis of every tweet from each candidate for the House in the final two months before the 2012 election reveals House candidates' "Twitter style." In particular, this article examines whether incumbents, Democrats, women, and those in competitive races tweet differently than challengers, Republicans, men, and those in safe districts.
PREVIOUS TWITTER RESEARCH
Mayhew (1974) argued that members of Congress (especially in...