In today’s election environment, candidates even on the local level are practically required to have a multifaceted approach to their online presence. A website, a Facebook page, a Twitter account — all ways of reaching out to supporters and spreading their message to potential voters.
It can be difficult to analyze the efficacy of any of these platforms when it comes to recruiting voters or increasing election-day turnout, and trickier still to collect solid data on how frequently the candidates are utilizing them.
Thankfully, there are a number of services that provide detailed analytics for at least one of these platforms: Twitter. We paid for a one-month subscription to Twitonomy, and received their permission to share the results here. You’ll be able to learn everything from their most popular posts to the platform to the average number of tweets they send out per day.
It goes without saying that the information below says more about a candidate’s (or their staffers) ability to engage well on social media than it does about their fitness to govern, but we found the results interesting nonetheless.
Readers: if you would prefer we change the layout of the data below, please let us know in the comments or by sending an email to editor@raleighpublicrecord.org.
We have arranged the gallery the same way we arranged the candidate interviews on the sidebar: alphabetically by candidate name, starting with mayor, then at-large councilors followed by districts A-E. The only candidate with no Twitter presence is District B incumbent John Odom.
