The size of his Twitter following weighed heavily on President Trump’s mind in the hours before his Oval Office meeting with the social media firm’s co-founder and CEO.
Why, he wondered via tweet, wasn’t it bigger? Although Trump ranks 13th among the world’s most widely-followed Twitter users, surely he would have more than 59.9 million followers if the San Francisco-based company wasn’t shadow-banning the supporters who catapulted him into the White House three years ago. After all, former President Barack Obama, several notches higher at No. 2, has 105 million.
“Very discriminatory,” the president mused, noting that followers regularly disappear in large swaths. “No wonder Congress wants to get involved.”
Fortunately for Trump, the perennially gridlocked legislative body doesn’t have to intervene for him to capture a bigger audience. Branding consultants say he might win more followers simply by indulging in fewer tweetstorms, which can quickly suck up all the space on a smartphone screen, following more of the people who follow him, and adopting a less divisive tone.
“One key thing that stands out right away is the follow-back ratio,” said Dave Kerpen, the chairman of consultant Likeable Media and the author of Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (And Other Social Networks), a New York Times bestseller.
While Obama’s following is sizable, he himself follows 614,000 people, Kerpen told the Washington Examiner.
Trump follows only 45, which is the “equivalent of people putting their hand out to take your hand and you rejecting them,” Kerpen said. “He’s essentially telling people that they’re not good enough, smart enough, or interesting enough for him to bother following them back, and he doesn’t want to see what they have to say.”
As for Trump’s concerns about anti-conservative bias, a topic on which he hasn’t tweeted since meeting with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday, social media executives have staunchly denied making decisions on a partisan basis, despite grilling by Republican lawmakers.
It’s true that some Twitter accounts are routinely deleted, Dorsey reportedly acknowledged to Trump, but shadow-banning isn’t the reason.
Rather, in the wake of complaints that Russian agents misused platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to sway the 2016 presidential election, the company has stepped up its policing of inauthentic accounts, routinely deleting networks of bots, accounts created via software to spread messages including political positions. The purges have affected the followings of virtually all Twitter users.
One of the reasons Obama has nearly twice as many followers, which the Daily Beast reported was the source of Trump’s angst, is that he was an early adopter, branding consultants say. Obama’s Twitter account was created in March 2007, the month the platform made its debut at the South by Southwest music, film, and interactive media festival in Austin, Texas.
That means he benefited not only from Twitter’s initial efforts to gain traction by recommending followers to its earliest users but from a history-making political campaign the next year in which he became the first black man to win the White House.
Trump, a ubiquitous presence in supermarket tabloids since at least the 1980s and a television star by the mid-2000s, didn’t join Twitter until March 2009.
Still, the 59 million followers he has drawn since is “nothing to sneeze at,” Kerpen said.
Many celebrities and politicians alike could reasonably be envious. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who joined the field of Democrats vying to unseat Trump in 2020, had only 3.5 million followers as of Thursday evening. Trump’s 2016 rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had 24 million; and Cher, the actress and singer who’s been performing since the mid-1960s, had 3.6 million.
Both Kerpen and brand consultant Ali Craig said social media users win more followers by establishing a unique presence, as Trump has done.
Twitter, however, enables him to reach a much broader and more diverse audience than, for instance, Facebook or Instagram, and it’s one where his tone can both repel and attract. Supporters may cheer tweets referencing “Crooked Hillary” or the strength of the nuclear arsenal Trump wields as commander in chief relative to that of North Korea, but others find it alarming.
North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018
“He’s definitely not being handled, nine times out of 10, by any kind of adviser, and he says stuff that would probably be OK if you knew him and knew his personality,” Craig told the Washington Examiner. “For a lot of people who don’t really know the man, like most of us don’t really know the man, it can be very, like, ‘Wait, what?'”
While people love an occasional small shock, finding it refreshing, too much can be overpowering. Then, “people don’t find it refreshing,” Craig said. “They think, ‘What the heck is going on? This scares me.'”
