Twitter’s hard spotlight could be harsh for foes
David Gerzof Richard, a professor of communication sciences at Emerson College and founder of BIGfish Communications, said President-elect Donald Trump, who amassed a Twitter following well before announcing his run, pioneered ways a candidate can use the social media platform to stir support, hone a message, and take the public’s pulse:
“Twitter provided him with a 24/7 focus group to be able to put a message out there, very short, succinct message, and get feedback for it in relatively simple terms — number of retweets, number of @ mentions.
If you actually look back, he was tweeting these things long before he was saying them. The reason he was so good with his message is he had such a long time to be able to work and refine it. This is a strategy that worked really well. He basically single-handedly took on the entire Clinton team and won. Yes, he used it to campaign to win the presidency, but now he has to campaign to do other things.
If he wants to build a wall, he’s going to need to campaign for it. If he wants to invest in infrastructure, he’s going to need to campaign for it. And I truly believe that what he’s going to do is similar to what he did to anyone that obstructed his way to the White House — bulldoze them on Twitter.
I can see him doing the exact same thing as president, trying to get something passed and having a senator or a congressman stand in the way. There’s a strong likelihood they would find themselves getting the Twitter spotlight put on them. And everybody that is Trump’s constituency, will probably get behind that and amplify that message. Literally, he could call out any obstructionist he wants on Twitter, and instantly everybody’s going to re-tweet that, and sparks will start flying out of that person’s phone.
To go from one or two mentions a day, to suddenly the entire application of Trump’s Twitter army coming after you, it’s quite attention-getting. I don’t necessarily know that alone would change someone’s mind, but it would certainly give them pause. To say, ‘Is this really something that I want to get into?’ It’s basically the smoke before the fire of what’s coming down the pipe at you.
Ironically, Twitter is a huge winner in the election. If you look at Twitter, it’s been on the decline. They’ve been having a really difficult time growing the platform, getting new users. With a president that uses Twitter as a main communication platform, all of a sudden at least half of America needs to follow him.
There’s a lot of people that I think did not want to hear his messages and decided, ‘I’m not going to follow him, I’m not going to give him that one extra number on his followers.’ Now, a lot of America is going to tune in to follow him. Suddenly there’s going to be countries waking up and being like, ‘What is this Twitter thing? We need to get on this, we need to follow this guy.’ ”