By Roy J. Wells, President, Triad Strategies
Last week we saw how a politician’s Facebook fan page can become the center of political discourse. Newly-elected Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) and four other Republican Senators crossed party lines and cast a procedural vote to end a Republican filibuster on the Democrats’ $15 billion jobs bill. According to the Associated Press, this vote registered over 4,200 comments on his fan page. The majority of comments castigated his vote, while a minority of comments supported it. There were even calls from the right to stop following him on Twitter. Despite all of this outrage, he still added 3,197 fans and 361 Twitter followers. Clearly, support him or not, people are still interested in listening to what he has to say, and he was able to issue a statement directly to them without it being filtered by the media.
Turning our attention to Pennsylvania and the race for the Republican nomination for Governor, Attorney General Tom Corbett appears to have embraced a social media strategy by putting up some impressive numbers over the past week. He increased his fan base by 58%, adding 1,232 new fans for a total of 3,356, surging ahead of State Representative Sam Rohrer who added 300 fans for a total of 2,952. Representative Rohrer, though, reached out to his fans more frequently last week. Corbett leads in total Twitter followers 497 to 297 though he only tweeted once to his following compared to Rohrer’s fourteen.
In the Democratic primary race, we saw very little movement. Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel still leads in total Facebook fans with 1,449, but Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato and State Senator Anthony Williams are not that far behind with 1,051 and 1,002 fans respectively. In fact, the combined increase of the Democratic candidates fan base was 146, well below the Republican combined increase of 1,532. Onorato still leads in total Twitter followers with 470, but Hoeffel continues to lead in total tweets with 171 for the week.
In the respective U.S. Senate primary races there was little movement in additional fans and followers. Senator Specter has noticeably increased his tweets with 16 this week to his 7,945 followers, while Congressman Joe Sestak tweeted six times to his 2,883 followers. Pat Toomey maintains an overwhelming lead over Peg Luksik with 8,565 fans and 4,208 followers compared to her 202 fans and 215 followers.
Here are this week’s totals:
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