Who does the North Carolina General Assembly follow on Twitter?
We’ve looked at who New York legislators follow on Twitter, to get a sense of whose voices the Empire State’s elected officials are most likely to see when they open the app. In this post, we’re going to head down to North Carolina to do the same for members of the General Assembly.
Twitter is one of the most popular platforms for political professionals to get their news. Users receive most of this content from the accounts that they follow and - luckily for our purposes - the accounts they follow are public. There are a total of 170 members of the North Carolina General Assembly who have Twitter accounts and follow others (120 House Members and 50 Senate Members).
We downloaded all the accounts that that legislators, or their staffs, looked at, thought they were for one reason or another worthy of keeping up with, and clicked “follow.” We have some preliminary conclusions below, and if you’re interested in conducting your own analysis or see how followed your own twitter account might be, you can access the 500 most followed accounts with the button below (free registration required). If you aren’t in the top 500 but want to know your own stats, send an email to chris@legislata.com with “NC Twitter request: (your screenname)” in the subject line and we can send you the stats for your account.
Our Findings
Back from checking out the data yourself? Okay, let’s dive into what we found.
North Carolina has a very active Twitter presence. Every member had at least one account, and most had both official and personal account. These numbers are higher in comparison with other state legislatures such as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Arizona. Whether that’s because North Carolinians are more tech savvy, a larger state which encourages more communication efforts, an important political swing state, or idiosyncratically keen to tweet is unknown.
Media-led
The NC State Legislature, similar to other states such as Rhode Island, holds the media in high regard when it comes to follows. When looking at the top 10, half of the accounts are involved with media and news reporting. Number 1 on our ranking is Colin Campbell, a Raleigh based news reporter that 73 members of the General Assembly are currently following.
While we can’t know if this means that elected officials use Twitter to get news, it is suggestive that they might - or at least that the news from these accounts pop up on their feed when they open the app. Especially since the list is dominated by local reporters focused on covering their respective regions in North Carolina, rather than national reporters or other media personalities, it indicates that elected officials use Twitter to find out what’s happening in their state, rather than simply politics in general.
Top 10 most followed accounts by the North Carolina Legislature. You can find the top 500 on Legislata (free registration required).
Swinging for the fences in a red sea
One of the themes of our research in other jurisdictions has been how polarization is apparent in who is followed on Twitter. North Carolina is no exception. While the state has been considered as a “purple” state given neither party’s ability to dominate the legislature, the most recent midterm elections saw heavy wins for the Republican party. We can see this reflected in the data.
The House and Senate Republican leaders sit at 7 and 8 on our ranking, which is considerable given how only 3 political figures are in the top 10, while the Democratic leaders sit at 21 and 22. Given polarization or the tendency for follows to go to those we work in a caucus with, that isn’t too surprising. However, it does raise questions of whether Republicans are missing out on what their opponents are saying by not following them online. Even Governor Roy Cooper missed out on the top ten, tied for 11th with former Democratic-turned-Republican Representative Tricia Cotham and Capital Tonight.
The top 1-20 have more Republicans than Democrats, but non-elected or party accounts still make up half the list. Data collected before NCPolicyWatch became NCNewsline.
Whether that means that members of the State Legislature are less informed about their peers’ positions than if they followed them on Twitter is unclear. They may all be keeping up with press releases, have text threads, or be in communication some way else.
But it certainly means that they’re either not taking advantage of how technology can make information sharing simple or they don’t find Twitter to be the most convenient platform for that. Luckily, Legislata has features to address this.
Legislata helps you stay on top of the information that underpins your political world. Manage your own information, stay alerted with what’s happening in your networks, and get your message out - all in one convenient place. You can join request an invite to our North Carolina community that has just launched here.
With LegislataPRO, you can also turn your inbox into a hub of productivity (and is an ideal solution for elected officials inundated by constituent communications). Sign up for a free account or schedule a demo to learn more.