💃😂 ✊: How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat everyone at Twitter in nine tweets

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

💃😂 ✊: How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat everyone at Twitter in nine tweets

In eight months, the new congresswoman has built one of DC’s most engaged followings. Here are her best moves

Max Benwell
Tue 12 Feb 2019 11.00 GMT

When it comes to Twitter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress last November, beats every other US politician hands, nose and elbows down. She has built one of the most engaged followings on Capitol Hill in just eight months and was even appointed to teach social media lessons to her colleagues upon her arrival.

How does she do it? I spend my days analyzing data for the Guardian and helping run our social media accounts, so I’m used to digging into numbers and figuring out what gets people going. And more often than not, it’s the less obvious things that reveal what’s really happening.

Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter account (@AOC) has more than 3.1 million followers. It has gained more than 2.6 million of these in the last eight months. Before she won her primary in June, beating a powerful 10-term Democratic incumbent, she only had 446,000 followers.

Ocasio-Cortez also has more than 2.1 million followers on Instagram and 500,000 on Facebook, but Twitter is where she really dominates the conversation.

-snip-

She may have far fewer followers than Trump (58.2 million), but if you look at her interaction rate, which averages out overall interactions per tweet against the account’s number of followers, it’s 2.8% for the last three months.

-snip-

She doesn’t let critics shape her narrative (June 2018)

Link to tweet

-snip-

She uses Fox News to her advantage (July 2018)

Link to tweet

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/12/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-twitter-social-media

[zipplewrath]

1. This keeps repeating

Targeting the far right is always going to be a popular move on Twitter. But it’s her use of “slaying lewks” that douses her already fire tweet with the most flammable thing on the internet: relatability. She speaks the language of her young fans, and they’ve probably never seen anything like it from a politician before.

Clinton going on the late night talk shows.
Dean's use of the internet to raise money and communicate with a new generation of politically aware.
Obama's direct outreach that culminated in OFA.
Bernie's direct communication with supporters that relied heavily upon decades of consistent messaging.

We keep "learning" that direct, authentic communication with the newly politically active electorate is an effective strategy.