This afternoon, to stir up some online enthusiasm over Thursday's big Presidential campaign launch event, Mitt Romney launched a little Twitter hashtag fun. It didn't really go so well.
From his @MittRomney account, the would-be President Tweeted:
I believe in America & look forward to sharing my vision with the country. Use & tell us why you believe in America
A little banal, sure, but exactly the kind of thing I think more candidates should be trying with social media. Usually when a major national figure poses a question like this, it generates a lot of responses, tagged with that hashtag (#mitt2012); sometimes it even becomes a "trending" topic on Twitter. In this case, that would serve to generate awareness and anticipation among Romney supporters about Thursday's event.
It didn't fly. By my count, only about 20 Twitter users offered a response -- not counting the ones blatantly mocking Romney, which nearly equaled the serious ones.
That's pathetic; we're talking about the Twitter feed of the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican Presidential nomination. He can't get more than a couple dozen people in the entire country to play along, two days before his official campaign launch?
Romney has 44,518 Twitter followers as I write this. That strikes me as awfully weak for someone of Romney's national stature, and suggests to me that the campaign has not put much effort into it. But in addition, the lack of response to his prompt today suggests that he doesn't have much engagement even among that group.
A check of Klout scores of social-media influence for the major GOP Presidential candidates (and potential ones) shows that Romney is doing very poorly, for a frontrunner. Klout is far from a perfect measure, to be certain, but it takes into account things like replies and retweets, and the reach of your followers, and so on.
Here are those Klout scores, as of this writing:
79 Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA)
75 Herman Cain (@THEHermanCain)
74 Newt Gingrich (@NewtGingrich)
72 Michele Bachmann (@MicheleBachmann)
71 Tim Pawlenty (@TimPawlenty)
68 Mitt Romney (@MittRomney)
68 Ron Paul (@RepRonPaul)
63 Gary Johnson (@GovGaryJohnson)
62 Rick Santorum (@RickSantorum)
Perhaps Mitt and his team will start making a real Twitter push after Thursday's launch -- I hope so, I'd hate to see him fall behind Santorum.
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