As mid-term elections are approaching, let’s take a look how Trump uses Twitter to his advantage.
1. He knows what to tweet and when to tweet
Trump knows exactly when and what to tweet to achieve maximum efficiency. One example is when Trump announced Rex Tillerson being his secretary of state. Tillerson has no political experience, and hasn’t made clear his political stance, which may not make him qualified. The decision was controversial none the less. However, it was announced by Trump on the same day he tweeted that he picked up votes in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and also meeting Kanye, NFL stars, and Bill Gates.
The controversial decision was buried under the other 2 tweets. Unfortunately, this is a pattern. Trump would always tweet 2 irrelevant tweets, which attracts the most attention, and quietly tweet something else more important. The ridiculous fact is that it is the exact strategy used to bring bad news. One would start with the good news so it would cover the bad news.
2. He understands the mentality of social media users
There were so much news about Trump during his campaign, either it is something uncovered about him or something he tweeted. If we were to ask you to rank a few, you probably can’t. However, we bet you can definitely name the controversy about Clinton. There were so much going on with Trump that most people could only remember a few of his controversies, and would have a hard time ranking them. Everybody would have different rankings.
In the end, you couldn’t hold on to one controversy because everything blends together and each controversy seemed better than it actually was. Whereas, Clinton had one major controversy which stuck with the users and they used it against her because they could remember it. It became way worse than it actually was.
3. He used Twitter as a weapon
Trump is estimated to tweet around 11 times a day, which caused him to dominate the political conversation on Twitter. He was also mentioned 130 million times during his campaign whereas Hillary Clinton was only mentioned 37 million times, which meant he had immense attention on him effectively stealing the spotlight. Of course not all tweets are made by Trump, no one could tweet that much per day. It has been suggested that tweets made from an iPhone, as well as less angry tweets ending with ”thank you!” are made by his staff.
What is crazy is that his more angry tweets are more popular, which causes more attention on him! As the saying goes, “Bad press is also press”, and Trump definitely gained a lot of free press. This was very important as Trump’s campaign budget was much lower than Clinton’s.