Within the range of web 2.0 applications, the microblogging platform Twitter has undergone an extraordinarily rapid diffusion, thanks in part to the exponential growth of mobile internet usage. Twitter statuses have an informative function per se, but they also perform networking, mobilizing and communicative tasks. In this paper we present an analysis of how public representatives, candidates and parties employed Twitter during the Republic of Ireland’s 2011 general election campaign. We investigate candidate uptake of the tool – examining whether those candidates who launched independent websites for the 2007 election are more likely to have and use a Twitter profile for the 2011 campaign. We develop a coding scheme for candidate and party Twitter usage which allows us to analyse the various ways in which this novel campaign tool is being used – we separate traditional campaign usages from those usages that represent campaign innovations. This paper seeks to deal with the technical and methodological caveats involved in the exercise of identifying candidates who are using Twitter, capturing their tweets, and analyzing and mapping the content of political actors’ ‘tweets’. These problems are firstly discussed in general terms, we then present an empirical case study of the Irish election campaign that seeks to deal with these issues.
