My Final Post: Donald Trump owns Twitter.
I don’t think it would be right to not discuss Donald Trump’s use of social media for this final blog post. Love him or hate him he has mastered social media and essentially used it to take over the free world.
‘The Donald’ is a master at Twitter, and here’s how:
1. Trump discovers Twitter
Recently I watched the Netflix documentary series Trump: An American Dream. The series is broken into 4 one hour episodes following Donald Trump from his upbringing to becoming a builder in Manhattan, to building bankrupt casinos, and becoming a reality television superstar. The final episode follows his political journey and rise to the presidency.
In the final episode, Politics, we see Trump develop the hit TV show The Apprentice while he toys with the idea of running for office. The most interesting part of this for me was that they actually detailed his journey of discovering and master Twitter.
Meet Peter Costanzo. While he only has 2200 twitter followers, he is the man that introduced the platform to Trump and could very well be the reason he was elected president.
Costanzo is a former PR and marketing specialist for a Running Press publishing group. In 2010 they published Trumps book Think Like a Champion. The episode details that Costanzo was tasked with developing a unique marketing strategy for the book. His answer? Twitter.
Trump apparently loved the idea of being able to communicate with both fans of the new book, fans of The Apprentice and more importantly fans of ‘The Donald’.
Fans and followers would send thousands of tweets praising Trump for his business skills, character and projects. The most common theme growing among the tweets was putting all this praise for Trump into asking him to run for president.
Costanzo says that people now had a direct way of letting Trump know that they wanted to see him run for office and truly believed that after events like the 2008 financial crisis, a businessman would ‘save’ the country.
Costanzo says that he believes Trump realized there was a power in Twitter, adding “it could be dangerous if you’re not thoughtful”.
Boy was he right about that…
2. Using Twitter to run for office
Fast forward five years. The 2016 election is impending. In the episode Trumps campaign aids describe Twitter as their “focus group”.
They would measure Trumps tweets about issues based on retweets and likes. If the issue Trump was tweeting about had more than 100 retweets it was an issue they were “winning on”.
His team would test tweeting about issues and policies to see what jived well with the American public.
That brings us to ‘the wall’. The infamous border wall that Trump proposed between the U.S and Mexico. Guess what? It wasn’t his idea. The idea came from his campaign team as one of many ‘tests’ on twitter.
The team proposed that Trump would tweet about building a wall on the border and get Mexico to pay for it. When they proposed the idea to Trump they added, “It will be like a licensing deal and no one builds like Trump”.
Trump loved the idea.
In 2016 he had over 10 million and his opponent Hillary Clinton had over 8 million followers. Forbes highlighted Trumps twitter metrics stating that Trump at the time had “25% more followers than Hillary and more than four times her number of tweets.” Today Donald Trump has over 50 million twitter followers, while Clinton trails behind at just over 22 million followers.
3. Today
Today Donald Trumps twitter feed is filled with both attacks at the people who challenge him and false statements to fuel his base.
Trump has championed twitter through a simple method. Tweet things that people want to hear and they’ll believe it. Just look at the tweet above. There are no facts, statistics or anything tangible to back up Trumps claims about employment and taxes. Yet, over 100,000 people liked the tweet, essentially praising Trump.
His tweets have resonated with the American people. Yet is Twitter responsible for pushing Trump into office?
Filter bubbles, which are essentially an algorithm used on various social media platforms to show you similar content you’ve been interacting with have been the subject of scrutiny lately. The more users like, view and retweet Trumps outrageous tweets, the more Twitter will show them in their feed, the more similar users Twitter will suggest and hide any content unrelated (ie: Democrats). This is especially dangerous when it comes to politics, as Twitter is acting as a gatekeeper only showing one side of the conversation. Yet for Trump it’s a massive win as his following is so large and the filter bubbles will keep his supporters chanting Make America Great Again for years to come.
Trump is a Twitter master, but Twitter needs to be careful about how their showing each side of an issue or story to it’s users.
P.S here’s one of my favourite Trump tweets.
It’s so random 🙈😂
