Drop in Twitter followers no concern for AZ politicians

ASU's Cronkite News reported that when Twitter announced it would delete inactive accounts, Arizona Sen. John McCain lost 210,000 followers. McCain had 3.39 million followers before the purge and 3.18 million after, a little more than 6 percent drop.

The changes were much the same for the rest of the Arizona delegation, although on a smaller scale, with most lawmakers seeing a drop of less than 1 percent of their followers, such as Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, who saw his followers drop from 588,000 to 583,000.

Analysts say that even those lawmakers who lost followers are not likely to see their messaging suffer. As Joseph Garcia put it, the power of the tweet is in the retweet.

“They are more concerned (with) what that message is that they are getting out there, and hoping that it gets repeated again and again and again,” said Garcia, a former political reporter who is now the director of communications and community outreach at ASU's Morrison Institute for Public Policy.

“All parties now recognize the power of social media in terms of directly reaching their constituents, their voters,” Garcia said, but noted that many of those who follow a candidate are not registered to vote, which takes “themselves out of the equation of having a direct impact on the outcome of an election.”

“In terms of the purging, I think they are more concerned with voter roster purging then they are Twitter purges,” Garcia said.

READ: Tweet retreat: Twitter purge trimmed lawmakers’ followers, impact small