When it comes to Twitter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress last November, beats every other US politician hands, nose and elbows down. She has built one of the most engaged followings on Capitol Hill in just eight months and was even appointed to teach social media lessons to her colleagues upon her arrival.
How does she do it? I spend my days analyzing data for the Guardian and helping run our social media accounts, so I’m used to digging into numbers and figuring out what gets people going. And more often than not, it’s the less obvious things that reveal what’s really happening.
Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter account (@AOC) has more than 3.1 million followers. It has gained more than 2.6 million of these in the last eight months. Before she won her primary in June, beating a powerful 10-term Democratic incumbent, she only had 446,000 followers.
Ocasio-Cortez also has more than 2.1 million followers on Instagram and 500,000 on Facebook, but Twitter is where she really dominates the conversation.
She already has more Twitter followers than the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (2.2 million), and she only just trails Joe Biden (3.3 million).
She may have far fewer followers than Trump (58.2 million), but if you look at her interaction rate, which averages out overall interactions per tweet against the account’s number of followers, it’s 2.8% for the last three months.
That may not sound like much, but to put it in perspective, Donald Trump’s is 0.2%. Barack Obama’s is 0.4%. Hillary Clinton’s is 0.2%. Bernie Sanders’ is 0.09%.
Even when you look at pure, non-weighted engagement, Ocasio-Cortez still punches well above her weight. For example, Trump has 21 times more followers than her. Yet he generated only 2.5 times as many total interactions as she did in January (43.2m compared to 17.5m).
All these numbers are useful for understanding the scale of Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter popularity, but do little in terms of explaining it. To further understand why they’ve done so well, here’s a brief timeline of her rapid ascent, and the tweets that have defined it:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ✔@AOC Some folks are saying I won for “demographic” reasons. 1st of all, that’s false. We won w/voters of all kinds. 2nd, here’s my 1st pair of campaign shoes. I knocked doors until rainwater came through my soles. Respect the hustle. We won bc we out-worked the competition. Period.
✔@AOC
Some folks are saying I won for “demographic” reasons.
1st of all, that’s false. We won w/voters of all kinds.
2nd, here’s my 1st pair of campaign shoes. I knocked doors until rainwater came through my soles.
Respect the hustle. We won bc we out-worked the competition. Period.
Ocasio-Cortez introduced herself to many voters with a campaign video in May that ended up going semi-viral. But it was her primary win in June that first gave her a national platform, and this tweet (her biggest in June) set the tone for how she was going to operate.
It quickly established that Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t going to let her critics – whether Republicans or Democrats – shape her narrative. Her tweet is a two-part fact-check. But instead of using cold stats like fact-checks usually do, she provides photographic and anecdotal evidence that’s much more personal and emotive.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ✔@AOC Pretty much!
Pretty much!
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