Obama Loses 36,000+ Twitter Followers in #Compromise Campaign [STATS]

President Obama created a barrage of activity on Twitter on Friday afternoon when he began urging his more than 9 million followers to tweet at their Republican Congressmen to “ask them to support a bipartisan solution to the deficit crisis.”

The @BarackObama account then proceeded to tweet out the Twitter handles of Republican Congressmen state-by-state. The account has also been making use of the hashtag #compromise in an effort to drive home the message of bipartisanship.

The results so far have been mixed. According to NM Incite, the #compromise hashtag had been used more than 22,000 times and reached 36 million users (followers of accounts using the hashtag) as of around 5 p.m. ET on Friday, and people had mentioned the President some 28,000 times in tweets. NM Incite says 40% of the @BarackObama mentions and 28% of the #compromise tweets expressed positive sentiment, with only 13% and 12% of them expressing negative sentiment, respectively.

As we noted in our earlier coverage, however, some users felt the state-by-state tweets were creating way too much noise — the President has lost nearly 37,000 followers so far today. You can see the drop as the day progressed in this chart from Simply Measured:

Obama’s losses appear to have been Republican’s gains, at least when it comes to followers. The National Journal notes that Republican congressmen on Twitter picked up a total of about 6,500 new followers Friday thanks to the exposure on the President’s widely followed account.


Meanwhile, certain states seemed more supportive of the President’s campaign than others. According to data from 140 Elect LLC, Twitter users in California, Georgia and Alabama retweeted the President’s call to action the most — more than 300 times in each state — while voters in South Carolina, Mississippi and North Dakota showed the least engagement with less than 100 retweets of their state-specific message.


Meanwhile, Simply Measured took a look at the states that made the most use of the #compromise hashtag:

Members of Congress also used the opportunity to fire back at the President (or echo his sentiments) with their own tweets.