A couple of days I wrote about MPs who tweet. Last week CRS produced a report entitled "Social Networking and Constituent Communication: Member Use of Twitter During a Two-Week Period in the 111th Congress". It's a fascinating snapshot of use of Twitter, and I'm sure many people will be looking closely at it.In it's summary it says: -
The data show that 158 Representatives and Senators are registered with Twitter (as of August 2009) and issued a total of approximately 1,187 “tweets” during the data collection periods in July and August 2009. With approximately 29% of House Members and 31% of Senators registered with Twitter, Members sent an average of 85 tweets per day collectively. House Republicans sent the most tweets (54%), followed by House Democrats (27%), Senate Republicans (10%), and Senate Democrats (9%). The data also suggest that more tweets were sent on Thursday than any other day of the week.
Members’ use of Twitter can be divided into six categories: position taking, press or web links, district or state activities, official congressional action, personal, and replies. The data suggest that the most frequent type of tweets were press and web link tweets, which comprised 43% of insession and 46% of recess tweets. This is followed by official congressional action tweets during session (33%) and position-taking tweets during recess (14%).
