AFTER six years in office, US President Barack Obama sent his first ever tweet from his very own account on Twitter on Monday (May 18), quickly amassing a million followers in five hours, according to Reuters, in the latest of many White House efforts to amplify his message with social media.
“Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really! Six years in, they’re finally giving me my own account,” Obama tweeted from his verified @POTUS account, which had more than 217,000 followers in its first 45 minutes.
His Twitter page featured an image of Obama, his family and civil rights leaders crossing Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march earlier this year.
Reuters said that a Twitter spokesman could not immediately confirm whether Obama had set a record. According to Guinness World Records, the fastest pace to a million followers was set by actor Robert Downey Jr. in 23 hours and 22 minutes in April 2014.
Obama and his advisers pioneered the use of social media like Twitter and Facebook in the 2008 presidential campaign and have embraced their use in the White House as well.
Obama described himself as “Dad, husband, and 44th President of the United States” and followed his alma maters, his beloved Chicago sports teams, cabinet members, government departments, and key members of the army of White House staff who tweet.
Obama also followed former presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but is not following @HillaryClinton, his former Secretary of State who is considered the frontrunner for the Democratic race for 2016.
It’s not the first time Obama has tweeted. He has occasionally signed tweets from the @WhiteHouse account with his initials, “-bo” and also has used @BarackObama, which is an account run by Organizing for Action, Obama’s former campaign team.
The @POTUS account will be “a new way for President Obama to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him,” said Alex Wall, a social media strategist with the White House, in a blog post.
And when his time in office is done, @POTUS will be passed on to future presidents, Wall said in a tweet.
On Monday, the White House tweeted a short video of Obama sending his tweet from the Oval Office, perched on the edge of the historic Resolute presidential desk, according to Reuters.
Obama reportedly used a White House iPhone to send the tweet, not his own high-security custom Blackberry. “I can’t use phones with recorders in them,” he explained on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” earlier this year. (with reports from Reuters)