Janet CollinsTwitter Goes to Washington
June 8th 2010 22:39
If you thought for one minute that “tweeting” politicians were just a passing fad, think again. In fact, political tweets are bound to become part of a politician’s day at the office since Twitter’s latest announcement that the company will be hiring its first employee in Washington.
The position is for government liaison and Twitter hopes that by having someone close to the power centre and specialising in government communication they can help politicians and policymakers tweet more effectively to their constituents and the world.
Twitter is still regarded as a small company of around 175 staff and operates entirely out of the one office in San Francisco, even though its global growth is nothing short of a phenomenon.
The social networking and micro-blogging service is still a relatively new company having only been founded in March of 2006, launching publicly in July of that year. At a recent technology conference, Chief Operating Officer, Dick Costolo, claimed that Twitter now attracts 190 million visitors per month and generates 65 million Tweets a day, so it is not an audience that any politician can ignore.
To give some indication of how fast the service is growing, in April Twitter claimed to have 180 million visitors per month and that 50 million tweets were generated each day back in February. If these figures are true, in two months the service has increased its visitors each month by 10 million and its daily tweets have increased by 15 million a day in just over three months.
Washington may be the first break out from San Francisco but will certainly not be the last. Costolo has indicated that offices in Los Angeles and New York are in the company’s sights as are the UK and Japan, two countries where growth has far exceeded company expectations.
It is the move on Washington though that will probably be the more important one. Liaising with some of the country’s top politicians, government officials and chief policymakers can make Twitter the sort of valuable and important connections that most lobbyists could only dream of. Not bad for something we had never heard of only five years ago.
Sourced: www.telegraph.co.uk; www.techcrunch.com
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