Twitter emerges as an essential political tool

Presidents and prime ministers, South American strongmen and nearly the entire US Congress have used Twitter to press their political platforms. But has the blue bird helped — or muddled — their message?
In the seven years since its creation, the micro-blogging service, which has announced it is planning an initial public stock offering, has become the indispensable tool for lawmakers and leaders as they seek to shape their country’s conversation.
Through it, they hope to release their message on their own terms — often unfiltered.
When US President Barack Obama, the politician with a record 36.5 million followers, decided to end the suspense and declare re-election victory last November over rival Mitt Romney, he bypassed traditional media and tweeted his “four more years” claim to the world.
It became the most re-tweeted post ever.
Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul is one of the most followed politicians in the world with 3.6 million, while the country’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has 3.1 million followers.
Both were eclipsed by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president who died in March with more than 4.1 million Twitter followers.
Twitter was probably a challenge for the verbose Chavez, who often rambled on for five hours during official speeches, to compress his messages into 140 characters.
In Europe, some leaders have been slow to embrace the service. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has no Twitter account, leaving the job to her spokesman.
And French President Francois Hollande stopped tweeting in 2012, transferring the role to the Elysee palace.
Twitter’s rapid US rise has been adeptly embraced by lawmakers like Sen. John McCain, who has the most followers of anyone in Congress. But it also led him into a stumble.
Early this year McCain drew fire when he compared then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a monkey that Iran had launched into space.
Britain’s David Cameron was among those who braced against what he called the “instantness” and early use of Twitter as a political tool, famously telling a radio show in 2009, when he was leader of the opposition, that “too many twits might make a twat.”
But the now prime minister, who has since joined Twitter and has 446,000 followers, acknowledged the benefit in boiling down a political message into a short sentence or two.
“You have to work at communicating something complicated in a simple way, otherwise you’re not going to take people with you,” Cameron said.