US ELECTION ON SOCIAL NETWORK

Social networking giant prepares for biggest night 

It has already been dubbed the first 'twitter election', and the social networking firm was today preparing for what is expected to be the biggest night in its short history.

Twitter has already seen record breaking numbers of tweets sent throughout the campaign, and expects tonight to break all records.

'The volume of conversation has exploded over last several years,' said Adam Sharp of Twitter, who is the firm's Head of Government, News and Soci

al Innovation, heading up a small six person team.

Twitter has created several special pages for the election, including this, which gives a snapshot of how the candidates are doing in terms of tweets

'There are more tweets every 2 days than every tweet sent before the 2008 election.'

Sharp said even he had been surprised by the number of tweets surrounding the election.

KEY ACCOUNTS TO FOLLOW

@BarackObama 
@MittRomney
@JoeBiden  
@PaulRyanVP
@MichelleObama
@AnnDRomney
@Obama2012
@Gov 

'It has been very impressive to see how engaged voters are.

'I the presidential debates, for example, more than 10m tweets were sent, with the biggest moment seeing 160k tweets per minute - double what we saw at the London Olympics when Usain Bolt was running.'

 

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Twitter works closely with both candidate's teams.

'We work with both campaigns, and with each major news organisation, and the team all come from Capitol Hill or journalism backgrounds.

'Our goal is to help them be successful - their voters are our users.'

Sharp is confident the service will stand up during the election.

'We've been fortunate with a lot of big events this year- the Olympics, conventions and debates.

'Our infrastructure is sound we believe - it's more about making sure we are ready to give news organisations details on the conversation, and what people are talking about.

'We never make predictions, although there is an office sweepstake with a pretty broad range of numbers - but its going to be a big night for us.

'Seven hours before major networks even start their coverage we are already seeing 14,000 tweets per minute.'

The firm is urging people to use the #election2012 hashtag for political tweets so it can easily collate them