Ever since incumbent Greg Nickels withdrew in late August, the Seattle mayoral race between Mike McGinn and Joe Mallahan has been heating up. Both remaining candidates have utilized Twitter to different degrees for their campaigns. While their showing in the primary was fairly similar (27.7% to 26.8%) their activity on Twitter is vastly different.
Both candidates maintain election specific accounts, (@mallahan4mayor and @mcginnformayor) but only McGinn has a personal account as well (@michaelmcginn). McGinn dominates in both followers and tweets. Not only that, but McGinn is frequently retweeted (24 times in the last 10 days) while Mallahan has only been 8 times. McGinn has somewhat of an advantage in that he started tweeting almost two months before Mallahan, but even looking at followers-per-week McGinn still has 56 and Mallahan only 25. Mallahan seems to only use the direct site to tweet, which might explain the imbalance somewhat, as McGinn uses a variety of twitter apps, including twittelator, a mobile twitter app for the iPhone.
Any political campaign is going to delegate tasks like updating web pages to campaign workers, so there are tweets for both candidates that are probably not written by them personally. Most are easy to identify, as they refer to the candidate in the 3rd person. But personal connection with the user is one of the strengths of Twitter, and McGinn creates that connection better than Mallahan. McGinn holds a personal account, updates his twitter via mobile devices from events he attends, and tweets @ supporters more often. If Seattle’s Mayor was chosen by twitter, it would definitely be Mike McGinn.
Note: Cheddr Media is not making any kind of endorsement for either candidate. We’re simply looking at the race through a social media lens.
