Wave-Riding and Hashtag-Jumping

With the description of the 2012 election as the ‘most tweeted’ political event in US history in mind, considering the relative media invisibility of the so-called ‘third-party’ presidential candidates in the US election process, and utilizing the understanding of retweeting as conversational practice, the purpose of this paper is to examine the use of Twitter by the four main ‘third-party’ US presidential candidates in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election in order to better understand (1) the volume of tweets produced by the candidates; (2) the level of interaction by followers in the form of retweeting candidate/party tweets; and, (3), the subject and content of the tweets most retweeted by followers of the respective parties. The ultimate goal of the paper is to generate a broader picture of how Twitter was utilized by minority party candidates, as well as identifying the issues which led followers (and their respective followers) to engage in the ‘conversational’ act of retweeting.