While eight Republican candidates duked it out Thursday night on a stage in Ames, Iowa, their campaigns waged a larger, if less obvious, fight online.
Throughout the debate, the Twitter feeds of the campaigns maintained a steady Internet drumbeat. They responded to candidates’ claims, retweeted supporters’ messages and hosted live chats, trying to boost their social media presence.
Of the eight candidates, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Rep. Michele Bachmann and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich maintained the most active Twitter presences. Those campaigns were constantly working to update their online messages throughout the evening.
Retweeting their candidates’ own quotes became a rapid-response strategy throughout the night, along with retweeting messages from their candidate’s supporters.
@Newt2012HQ was the most active retweeter, culling from a massive pool of supporters to retweet lines like “Gingrich gets my vote as the winner of the debate tonight thus far! #GOPDebate.”
@TeamBachmann for the most part linked to talking points, but supplemented Bachmann’s own statements with further explanations.
The unofficial @timpawlenty account remained largely silent. Occasionally, though, @PawlentyTweets attempted to use the social media platform by rebutting talking points from other candidates and responding with links to relevant news articles.
Though Herman Cain’s press operation (@CainPress) advertised a live chat, his site appeared to crash early on and could not be accessed during the debate.
The Huntsman campaign seemed fond of tweeting quotes from the former Utah governor. “I’m running for President of the United States because I love this country,” the feed messaged just as the back-of-the-pack candidate himself uttered those words on the Ames stage. “We have a cancer growing in this country called debt.”
It remains to be seen whether the candidates who executed the strongest Twitter strategies will see that engagement pay off. Those candidates’ social media teams attempted to leverage their messaging for an intensely interested audience: the thousands of people who followed the debate on Twitter using the hashtags #GOPdebate and #amesdebate.