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 Trump's campaign account @realDonaldTrump has nearly 6 million
Twitter followers, the most of any candidate running for president.
But he is picky about who he follows, with just 49 accounts listed
as of Friday. That means he has the highest ratio of followers to
those he is following, in both the Republican and Democratic fields.
In contrast, Ted Cruz, the U.S. senator from Texas who has emerged
as Trump's strongest rival, follows nearly 14,000 accounts on
Twitter and has 755,000 followers, according to his profile as of
Friday.
The exclusivity underscores how Trump primarily uses Twitter to
broadcast his message as opposed to engaging in a back and forth
with users, experts in digital strategy said. While other campaigns
use a similar approach, Trump commands the most attention on social
media.
Trump's pickiness may indicate a surprising strategy for the
freewheeling Republican front-runner: Playing it safe when it comes
to pledging his Twitter allegiance with a "follow."
Candidates can't pick and choose their followers, but they have
control over when to click the follow button.
"There is more risk in who you follow," said Scott Talan, a
communications professor at American University who teaches social
media strategy. "If you’re actively following someone, you’re
assuming it's not going to be some religious extremist ... or a
prisoner with a record."
And, while some Republican candidates follow each other, Trump
follows none of them.
The accounts Trump monitors include those of his children and
several hotel properties. Also on the eclectic list are musician
Steven Tyler, basketball great Magic Johnson, Vince McMahon,
chairman and CEO of WWE Inc, and sisters Lynette “Diamond” Hardaway
and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson, former Democrats who now stump for
Trump and tweet under the handle @DiamondandSilk.
Despite Trump's highly public battle with Fox News over anchor Megyn
Kelly's role as a moderator in last week's Republican debate, Fox
shows or news personalities such as Sean Hannity account for better
than 10 percent of the handles he follows. Kelly, not surprisingly,
did not make the list, but the Fox handles still add up to a larger
bloc than any outside of Trump's family or business.
Hannity and other Fox presenters are also widely followed by Trump's
rivals for the GOP presidential nomination.
Trump's cautious approach to who he follows hasn't put a damper on
his social activity. His account shows more than 30,000 tweets, the
highest of any account reviewed by Reuters.
It also hasn't stopped Trump from committing blunders with his
retweets, like the one from an account called @WhiteGenocideTM,
which gave its location as "Jewmerica" and featured an image that
referenced George Lincoln Rockwell, a prominent figure in the
neo-Nazi movement in the United States.
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"A LOOSE CANNON"
Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said that Trump
operates his own Twitter account. "Everything you see on there is
pretty much directly from him," she said. "The strategy behind it is
to tell the truth and to call it like he sees it."
On Twitter, Trump goes where his opponents fear to tread. He uses it
to launch unfiltered personal attacks on those who cross paths with
him. For example, he did not shy from retweeting a post that
included photographs of a skimpily dressed Kelly from a magazine
shoot and the comment, "And this is the bimbo that's asking
presidential questions?"
"He is definitely a loose cannon in terms of how he uses his Twitter
account," said Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Media,
an online forum on technology and politics. "At the same time, he
hasn’t been hurt by it yet because apparently a big chunk of what
he’s saying is popular among Republican voters."
Trump is aware of his social media success. Following the seventh
Republican presidential debate on Thursday, he tweeted Twitter data
showing that he commanded the most traffic during the event. "Great
Twitter poll-and I wasn't even there," he said.
Twitter matters to campaigns - it is an increasingly important way
for candidates to reach their most ardent supporters.
But talking about the issues on Twitter may not always be the most
effective means of engaging supporters. A recent Trump tweet wishing
retired golfer Jack Nicklaus happy birthday received more than four
thousand “likes”, roughly twice as many as Clinton’s policy-related
tweets on the same day.
(Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus and Amy Tennery in New York,
editing by Dan Burns and Ross Colvin)
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