Skip to main content

Twitter's Political Engagement Map tracks how people respond to the candidates' tweets

Twitter's Political Engagement Map tracks how people respond to the candidates' tweets

Share this story

Romney Obama Twitter Engagement
Romney Obama Twitter Engagement

Twitter has been particularly active this election cycle, offering tweet-based popularity charts of Romney and Obama and selling its first political trending topic. Today, it's added the Political Engagement Map, another effort to harness Twitter's potential as a polling platform. The map is conceptually simple: it takes each recent tweet from Romney and Obama and checks the number of favorites and retweets it's received, then checks location to plot it by US state. Clicking on a given tweet displays where engagement is strong, and entering a keyword brings up the most popular tweets that include it. In practice, seeing a map that's entirely red or blue is initially confusing, but being able to sort by individual tweets and states is a great idea.

It's important not to see the Engagement Map as equivalent to a poll, at least in this campaign cycle. Broadly, there's no guarantee that "engagement" means "agreement," even if replies — where most rebuttals take place — aren't counted. And no matter what the engagement of a given tweet, the results are heavily skewed by Obama's Twitter lead. @BarackObama has about 7,600 tweets and 21.6 million followers, while @MittRomney has only 1,300 tweets and 1.6 million followers, and Romney has tweeted far less frequently during the election. That means virtually every keyword brings up a long list for Obama and a handful of tweets from Romney. As long as you keep those caveats in mind, though, it's a fascinating way to see how well the candidates' platitudes play in real time.