Social media use by Barack Obama
During his campaign, he became the first presidential candidate of a major party to utilize social networking sites (such as podcasting, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube) to expand and engage his audience of supporters and donors.
In his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama had more friends on Facebook and Myspace and more followers on Twitter than his opponent John McCain.
[5] Obama has used Twitter to promote legislation and support for his policies,[3][6][7] as well as respond to the public regarding current political issues like the economy and employment.
[15][16] On August 13, 2019, at 14:39 PDT, Obama's account overtook Katy Perry to become the most-followed person on Twitter with over 107 million followers.
[29] Speaker of the United States House of Representatives John Boehner participated by tweeting "Where are the jobs?"
On July 29, 2011, during the United States debt-ceiling crisis, @BarackObama lost over 40,000 followers when the president urged Americans "to call, email and tweet Congressional leaders to 'keep the pressure on' lawmakers in hopes of reaching a bipartisan deal to raise the nation's $14.3 trillion debt limit ahead of an August 2 deadline.
[34] Later in 2011, Obama used Twitter again to try to encourage the people to voice their opinion on legislation when he was attempting to pass the American Jobs Act.
[41][clarification needed] In 2008, the Obama presidential campaign spent $643,000 out of its $16 million Internet budget to promote his Facebook account.
[42] On June 17, 2008, after Hillary Clinton ended her campaign, the number of followers of Barack Obama's Facebook account increased to one million.
[44] Steve Spinner noted that while previous campaigns have used the internet, none had yet taken full advantage of social networking features.
[44] According to Hughes, during the 2008 campaign, over two million accounts were created on the website to "organize their local communities on behalf of Barack Obama.
Four hundred thousand videos that supported Obama were posted on YouTube via the official website.
[42] President Barack Obama made a surprise half-hour visit to the social news website Reddit on August 29, 2012.
In response to Obama's use of Reddit, many noted bypassing generally established mainstream media channels during the 2012 campaign in favor of less-filtered and closer forms of communication.
