ABSTRACT
In recent years, social media have experienced tremendous growth in user base and are said to have an impact on the public discourse and on communication. For example, there are about one billion active members per month of the Facebook network (Facebook 2013) while Twitter counts about 170 million active accounts in total (Techcrunch 2012). This mainstream adoption of social-media applications
has changed the physics of information diffusion which is no longer controlled by a small number of ‘gatekeepers’. Given their tremendous growth, social media are recently increasingly used in a political context. It has been observed that in a very short time, politicians in modern democracies across the world have eagerly adopted social-media platforms seeing powerful new media in them which can be used for engaging their constituents, especially during election campaigns (Hong & Nadler 2011; Thimm et al. 2012). In this regard, US politicians are said to have a leading role with the most prominent example of Barack Obama who has successfully employed social media within the election campaigns both in 2008 and 2012. Furthermore, Twitter has become a legitimate and frequently used communication channel in the political arena for citizens (Tumasjan et al. 2011). With the unique feature of ‘retweeting’ as a simple yet powerful mechanism for information diffusion, Twitter is an ideal platform for any user to spread political information and opinions. Nevertheless, so-called political ‘influentials’ or opinion-makers exist who are said to have an impact on the political opinionmaking and agenda-setting processes as well as on communication behavior of other users. However, little research has been devoted to this group of influential users. Therefore, in this paper we seek to investigate how Twitter is used for political communication during election periods with specific focus on characteristics and communication behavior of influential accounts.
