President Barack Obama wrote and published his own tweet today on the @BarackObama Twitter account, asking the American public to “Call. Email. Tweet.” their representatives in Congress to “#compromise” on the solution raising the debt ceiling.
“The time for putting party first is over. If you want to see a bipartisan #compromise, let Congress know. Call. Email. Tweet. —BO,” the tweet reads.
Earlier this week, Obama caused a complete jam of the House of Representatives phone lines after he asked citizens to phone their representatives about the debt ceiling standoff. At the time of this writing, Twitter is still up and running.
Also this week, someone behind the @WhiteHouse Twitter feed rickrolled Twitter user David Wiggs, a surprisingly in-touch move that’s sure to win over at least a few constituents come 2012.
Last month, the president’s reelection campaign, Obama for America, announced (via Twitter, of course) that Obama would be “regularly” posting his own tweets. Any tweet written by the commander-in-chief himself would be signed “—BO.” This debt ceiling tweet is the fist Obama has written himself since that announcement.
While Obama may not have time to regularly send off 140-character thoughts about the state of the union, it’s clear that the microblogging service has become an important tool for getting the president’s word out on the campaign trail.
Earlier this month, President Obama held the first ever “town hall meeting” on Twitter. Approximately 169,395 tweets were submitted with the pre-ordained “#askobama” hashtag. (About 36 percent of these were spam.) Obama then answered a selection of these questions live at the White House. Some of the questions, chosen by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who played the role of moderator, came in live, and the president answered the questions on the fly.
Prior to the Twitter town hall, Obama held another first for social media: a town hall meeting at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, which was broadcast exclusively on the social network.
Twitter is currently growing at an average rate of about 460,000 new accounts created every day, according to the company blog. Despite the impressive growth and unique ability to connect people with one another, the company is still toying with ways to generate revenue. Perhaps the Obama bump might help set things on the right path.
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