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We help you build successful Twitter campaigns

140elect is a full-service Twitter consulting firm. We work with businesses, nonprofits, and political campaigns to build communities and mobilize them to act. We know there is no one-size-fits-all online solution. We want to talk with you to discuss your individual goals so we can develop custom solutions.

To explore the possibility of working with us, or to learn more about the strategy and technology services we provide, just call: 650-644-6688.

Here are some of the things we can do for you:

  • Real, Quality, Targeted Follower Growth
  • Account Management and Training
  • Custom Web Pages with Full Twitter Client Features
  • Daily Advice and Tweet Suggestions
  • Twitterbombs, Fundraising, and Promoted Ads
  • Real-Time Analytics To Drive Results
    • Learn More About What We Do →

Secrets of Effective Tweeting Campaigns

Below is our guide to effective political tweeting. The secrets revealed here will help you write tweets that motivate thousands of people to become active supporters and spread your message. We keep adding to this list, so bookmark this page and watch this space, or subscribe to our RSS feed. If you need help putting these secrets to work for your campaign, check out our consulting services page or contact us.

Secrets of Effective Political Tweeting

May 10, 2012

Welcome to our guide to effective political tweeting, with real examples from the 2012 election. The secrets revealed here will help you write tweets that motivate thousands of people to become active supporters and spread your message. Whether you’re an activist, part of a campaign or non-profit, or a reporter, this blog will be your [...]

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Rebuilding 2012twit.com for the General

April 20, 2012

When we first launched 2012twit early last year there were over 20 potential GOP candidates, and so we built a graph that could display real-time Twitter statistics for all of them at once. Now that the General Election has begun, we’ve flipped this graph to show just the horse-race between President Obama and Governor Romney. [...]

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Search Mitt Romney’s Tweets

April 16, 2012

Here’s a fun feature: use the input below to search every tweet @MittRomney has ever sent.One search I like is “women.” Mitt Romney never addressed women as a group before Santorum dropped out and the General Election began. Governor Romney was finally forced to address women directly, and used the opportunity to attack Obama three [...]

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GOP Primary Attacks on @MittRomney

April 14, 2012

Two days ago the Washington Post published a timely piece titled, “How YouTube and Twitter are hurting Mitt Romney.” Aaron Blake (@FixAaron) and Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) argue YouTube, Twitter, and other New Media will make Romney’s shift to the center during the general election all the harder, basically because we have Mitt on tape. Of [...]

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The Primary is finally over, the War begins

April 11, 2012

It’s over! Rick Santorum dropped out of the GOP primaries to avoid a bruising defeat in his home-state of Pennsylvania that would cast serious doubts on his more serious 2016 candidacy. We will welcome him back in three years as a “major contender for the GOP front-runner,” and the “true social conservative” facing the fiscal [...]

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TwitChimp: Manage and Embed Twitter Lists

April 10, 2012

On the Twitter development side, we’ve been working on a directory website that is quickly becoming a full-fledged list manager: TwitChimp. Soon you will be able to import lists you’ve created on Twitter, re-arrange and annotate, then embed them onto your website. Below is the first instance of a custom Twitter profile widget, with a [...]

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Connecting Democratic Voters

January 24, 2012

Now that the number of GOP candidates for president are dwindling down to a precious few, we are going to be making a shift in focus. For the past year we have been tracking and analyzing the battle for the GOP nomination on Twitter through our 2012twit.com and 140elect.com sites. This work will continue, but [...]

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Donating Tweets to Political Campaigns

January 9, 2012

We have had a glowing article from Mashable, and a major attack from techPresident. Both Alex Fitzpatrick from Mashable and Nick Judd from techPresident have covered us before, with varying levels of positive, neutral, and negative responses. Donating Tweets is a new idea in Twitter campaigning used to some degree by justcoz.org and donateyouraccount.com. They [...]

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Building a Successful Twitter Campaign

January 5, 2012

NOTE: See How the Internet Saved Buddy Roemer’s Presidential Campaign, just published on Mashable. Then check out how we can boost your political campaign on Twitter. So you want to build a campaign on Twitter for your non-profit, political candidate, or business. Our specialty at 140elect.com is the 2012 election, with a current focus on [...]

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#CainWreck makes a boom, #Newt capitalizes

December 3, 2011

As Herman Cain exits the 2012 Presidential race, his competitors bid farewell. Newt Gingrich has done the best job, coming up with the most shared tweets. These were clearly well thought out, and sent just as Cain announced so that media outlets would include signs of Gingrich’s good will. Gingrich capitalizing on the CainWreck makes [...]

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Announcing Twitter Campaign for Buddy Roemer

November 30, 2011

Presidential candidate Buddy Roemer announced today he would be using the services of 140elect.com to enhance his campaign on Twitter. See the Press Release here → If you haven’t heard from Roemer lately, check him out on Morning Joe yesterday. Limiting campaign contributions to $100 per individual, rejecting PAC or special interest money, and being [...]

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#OWS hashtag is evolving

November 24, 2011

Yesterday I was contacted by a reporter who wanted stats from our #OWS database to see how the movement was developing. I looked at the overall rate of tweeting with the tags #ows, #occupy, and #occupywallstreet, and found that it has been declining over the last 30 days. That is one possible story about the [...]

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10 Ways Twitter Boosts Political Campaigns

November 19, 2011

With Twitter spurring political upheavals across the globe, it would be naïve to entertain the notion that this new medium for mass social communication won’t fundamentally alter the political process here in the United States. Yet most political campaigns, which spend millions on television and online advertising, have failed to invest in the platform beyond [...]

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Locating voters through Twitter

November 16, 2011

UPDATE: We were quoted in this related Mashable article: How Political Campaigns Can Turn Social Media Support Into Votes The holy grail of politics on Twitter has been identifying the geographic location of users. We get asked for a solution to this problem all the time. Unfortunately, it isn’t as easy as it seems. There [...]

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Twitter Predicts Polls [VISUAL]

November 11, 2011

UPDATE Nov. 14: This story has been quoted in Mashable. Today’s CBS News poll is the top tweet and breaking story of the morning, with Herman Cain leading the 2012 GOP and Newt Gingrich gaining, tied for second with Mitt Romney. That’s no surprise to us at 140elect. Thanks to our Twitter tracking and metrics, [...]

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Rick Perry goes Oops, Twitter goes Wow

November 9, 2011

Rick Perry had what we scientists call a brain-fart at today’s GOP debate, forgetting the third agency he would eliminate as president. While only raking in 2,558 mentions for the first hour of the debate, his oops moment helped him rake in another 16,342 mentions in the second hour, leaving him the most talked about [...]

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Herman Cain’s Sexual Harassment Scandal, pt.2

November 8, 2011

Last week Herman Cain broke a record, getting more mentions in a single day than any other GOP candidate ever had. Barack Obama was the only politician to have received more mentions in one day, and only twice: when Congress raised the debt ceiling and when he killed Osama Bin Laden. With a fourth woman accusing Cain of sexual harassment, Cain received more mentions than the first day POLITICO broke the story, and even more mentions than Obama got for killing Bin Laden!

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Buddy Roemer becoming the Twitter Candidate

November 1, 2011

Have you heard about Buddy Roemer? He’s been running for president since the first big spike in the graph below, announcing on July 21st. Also known as the $100 candidate, Roemer’s main issues are government corruption and campaign finance reform. Refusing PAC money and limiting donations to $100 per person have been major limiting factors [...]

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Herman Cain’s Sexual Harassment Scandal

October 31, 2011

UPDATE: This story has been quoted in the Washington Post. Last night POLITICO broke a sexual harassment story on Cain that’s set Twitter on fire: During Herman Cain’s tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior [...]

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Drilling down into #OWS hashtags

October 28, 2011

The #OWS database can do more than just show which tags are most popular. It can also let you see how these tags are being used and by whom. The starting point for this analysis is the Top Hashtags report. This report has two links for each tag. You can click the tag name to [...]

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Boost your tweet visibility with hashtags

October 27, 2011

One of the best ways to reach Twitter users who aren’t already following you is to make your tweets more visible in search tools, like search.twitter.com or Tweetdeck. The key is knowing which tags to include. The #OWS tweet database shows that thousands of different tags are used in tweets about the Occupy movement. But [...]

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#OWS tweet collection server dashboard

October 26, 2011

The starting point for the Occupy Wall Street tweet collection server is the dashboard. It gives you a quick overview of what type of data we are collecting and how much has been received from Twitter. 1. The Collection Keywords section shows you which terms are being requested from Twitter. The current results show that [...]

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#OWS tweet collection restarted on a new server

October 24, 2011

Last week we tried collecting all tweets for the Occupy movement, but found that the flow was too much for the server we used. There were twice as many tweets containing #ows, #occupy, and #occupywallstreet as for the entire 2012 election. We moved this system to a much bigger server, and started it again this [...]

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Farewell, Sarah, We’ll Miss You

October 24, 2011

It is with great sadness that we have removed Sarah Palin’s wordcloud and tweet stream from 2012twit.com. Now that she has finally admitted she wasn’t going to run in 2012, we had no choice. We’ve replaced her with a wordcloud and tweets collected from all the members of Congress who have Twitter accounts. That’s right, [...]

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Twitter Analysis of the #CNNdebate

October 19, 2011

Tuesday’s CNN debate was the nastiest yet, with more anger and accusations between candidates than ever before. Whereas the 2012 GOP had managed to stay focused on President Obama this past summer, the latest debates have seen greater infighting over issues such as taxes, immigration, and health care. The cloud above shows the most frequent [...]

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Twitter says nobody cares about Perry

October 19, 2011

October has been a tough month for Rick Perry. His Tea Party supporters have left him en masse after the three September debates, and flocked to Herman Cain. Last week, I put together statistics on the number of mentions Perry, Cain, and Romney have received each day. People have largely stopped talking about Perry. New [...]

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Reactions to the Romney-Perry Feud

October 19, 2011

I’ve been having fun with word clouds tonight, so I decided to put one more together. The best part of tonight’s CNN debate, from an entertainment standpoint, was the face-off between Governors Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. It’s hard to say whether it will play out better for Romney or Perry, although I think the [...]

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We’re going to need a bigger server

October 17, 2011

It doesn’t look like the server I’m using for tweet collection can handle the flow of tweets with #ows, #occupy, and #occupywallstreet. The load got too high, so I stopped the data collection. I’ll have to move this system to one of our bigger servers later this week. But we did collect data for 3 [...]

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Browsing the @4More tweet collection database

October 17, 2011

Now that the database code for collecting tweets based on Occupy hashtags is running, the next step is creating a simple browsing interface that will let us drill down into these tweets. This is usually written as a back-end tool for our own use, so it doesn’t have the wizzy interface of a site like [...]

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Tweet Collection for @4More Engagement

October 17, 2011

Zach has laid out the overall strategy behind the @4more account. Now its time to build the database foundation for this Twitter engagement campaign. The first task for an engagement campaign is setting up a server to collect tweets based on the right keywords. These tweets will let us discover the most influential accounts, along [...]

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Will Occupy movement lead to another tech wave?

October 14, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street movement has gained the attention of the political world, and there is much speculation on its possible effect on the 2012 election. Personally, I find the potential technological outcome even more interesting. The parallels between the unemployed activists behind Occupy and the unemployed technologists who backed the Howard Dean campaign in [...]

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Perry Attacking Fellow #2012GOP not Obama

October 11, 2011

Mentions of Obama in 2011 @MicheleBachmann 73 @MittRomney 68 @newtgingrich 59 @THEHermanCain 44 @fredkarger 31 @GovGaryJohnson 30 @RickSantorum 24 @JonHuntsman 16 @RonPaul 10 @GovernorPerry 0 What happened to focusing like a laser on Barack Obama’s failed policies? The 2012GOP were doing pretty well this summer with only minor skirmishes, aka Midwesterner Bloodbaths, between Tim Pawlenty [...]

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The Fall of Rick Perry and Rise of Herman Cain

October 10, 2011

I’ve been following the 2012 Presidential race full-time since the beginning of 2011, and it has been fascinating to watch the Tea Party shift their support from candidate to candidate with each set of debates. The first GOP debate in South Carolina in early May launched Herman Cain into the limelight. The “Cain Train” lost [...]

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Twitter Campaigns – Messaging in 140 Characters

October 5, 2011

So far we have covered how to understand engagement, gain influential followers, and build a community of interest. Through all of these posts there has been a basic assumption: you know how to tweet. This post will cover how to effectively translate your campaign messaging into 140 characters or less, the limit for tweets. This [...]

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Twitter Campaigns – Gain Influential Followers

October 4, 2011

I’ve gotten a few emails this week from folks looking to boost their Twitter campaigns. The big question is, how can you grow your follower count? The answer I give is to follow others, short and simple. While that is the basic idea, here is the expanded edition. The first issue is precisely who to [...]

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Twitter Campaigns – Understanding Engagement

October 3, 2011

For the first-time user, Twitter can appear similar to Facebook in a number of ways. These ‘newbies’ tend to use their accounts primarily for status updates, telling what’s happening now. Users with a bit more experience and investment see the value of Twitter as a broadcast medium, allowing messages to reach thousands directly with little [...]

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SNL Presents the Seventh or Eighth #GOPDebate

September 26, 2011

Anyone who missed it this weekend should take a moment to watch this opening skit from the last Saturday Night Live.

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Most Mentioned #2012GOP for #CNNDebate

September 12, 2011

What do Twitter mentions mean in the context of a political campaign? In my experience, Twitter Mentions are leading indicators of a candidate’s position in the national polls over the following month. After the first #GOPDebate in South Carolina in early May, Businessman Herman Cain broke through to become the most mentioned candidate on Twitter [...]

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2012Twit.com is now tracking @RonPaul

September 10, 2011

We started collecting data on all potential 2012 GOP candidates at the beginning of 2011 for 2012twit.com, and at that time Ron Paul’s official account was @RepRonPaul. At the end of April, his presidential campaign created @RonPaul. By late June we had a lot of requests to switch over our tracking to use this new [...]

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The Growing Rick Perry Execution Meme

September 10, 2011

The idea of linking Rick Perry with executions in Texas has been present on Twitter for months, but it really took off on August 7th with the CNN debate, as shown on this 30 day graph of tweets. This association has been crystallized into a specific tweet with the text “Statistically, You Have a Better [...]

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Reaction to Obama’s Jobs Speech Tweets

September 8, 2011

The @BarackObama account live tweeted the highlights of his jobs speech tonight, and that allows us to measure public reaction to each of his points through retweet counts. This type of instant focus group is one of great advantages of Twitter for political messaging. 2,153 retweets 111948171592208384 BarackObama Barack Obama “We are tougher than the [...]

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#2012GOP Response to “Zero Jobs Created in August”

September 2, 2011

Talk of jobs has been quickly rising and falling away in August, while many initiatives and proposals have been offered by both sides. The below graph shows the frequency of “jobs” in tweets about either Barack Obama or the 2012 GOP. The Presidential Candidates have been making more noise about jobs than Obama throughout August, [...]

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Is Twitter losing interest in Sarah Palin?

September 2, 2011

The news that Sarah Palin may be participating in the September 12th Tea Party debate without having declared her candidacy is just another step in the long saga of Palin’s effort to keep herself in the limelight. But is the public finally getting tired of this game? The Twitter data says yes. Based on new [...]

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Sarah Silverman kills with Santorum Tweet

September 1, 2011

109070567365287936 SarahKSilverman Sarah Silverman I swear to God I don’t mean this sarcastically or as a joke, I’m just earnestly asking: Is Rick Santorum retarded? Aug 31, 2011 9:10pm ReplyRetweetFavorite @SarahKSilverman scored a direct hit on @RickSantorum last night with this tweet, which has now gotten 970 retweets, making it one of the most retweeted [...]

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Evolution of “Bachmann’s husband is gay”

August 31, 2011

Candidate’s spouses don’t usually get much attention, but Michele Bachmann is an exception. Almost 7% of all tweets mentioning Bachmann also include the word ‘husband’, while only 0.07% of tweets about other 2012 GOP candidates mention ‘wife’. The amazing fact is that half of the tweets mentioning her husband also include the word ‘gay’. Since [...]

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Who reacted to Bachmann’s comments on God?

August 30, 2011

Yesterday’s statement from @MicheleBachmann that the recent hurricane and earthquake were a warning from God generated a lot of buzz on Twitter, with 8,091 tweets sent containing ‘bachmann’ and ‘god’. But who was doing all the tweeting? Was the religious right commenting on this, or was the left using this as another excuse to paint [...]

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Jon Huntsman’s big tweet keeps paying off

August 29, 2011

Breakthrough is such an easy word to throw around, but what does it actually mean? @JonHuntsman‘s big tweet on August 18th is a great example. It isn’t just that he got more retweets than any GOP candidate for a single day. It looks like the effects are lasting. We compared his new followers, @mentions, and [...]

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Get the Hell Off the Beach. Tweet You’re Safe.

August 27, 2011

While none of the 2012 GOP have tweeted about Hurricane Irene, Governors along the East Coast and President Obama have been creating quite a buzz. Mike Bloomberg’s Twitter account has been by far the most active and retweeted, providing evacuation information and safety tips to New Yorkers. Chris Christie has had his usual directness: 107217369251840000 [...]

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Santorum under attack from gay activists

August 26, 2011

Most Frequent Mentioners of Santorum and ‘gay’ in Last 30 Days @GoogleSantorum_ 20 tweets @glbtworldnews 19 tweets @OnTopMag 17 tweets @LambdaLibris 15 tweets @tlrdfeed 12 tweets The fact that 14% percent of all tweets mentioning @RickSantorum include the word ‘gay’ is a clear sign that people are working hard to make that association. Here are [...]

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Gay Politics in 2012 GOP Race

August 26, 2011

Issues like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military and gay marriage have been dividing the social right from the left for decades, so it isn’t surprising that they find their way into thousands of tweets directed at 2012 GOP candidates. Over the next few blog posts we’ll look at the most frequently mentioned candidates [...]

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