How political candidates use Twitter and the impact on votes

• Investigates the link between the use of Twitter by political candidates and electoral support.
• Political candidates mainly use Twitter to talk about their private persona.
• An important characteristic of campaigning on Twitter is the use of interactive features.
• Candidates who used Twitter during the campaign received more votes than those who did not.

This study investigates the content characteristics of Twitter during an election campaign, and the relationship between candidates’ style of online campaigning (i.e., politically personalized and interactive communication) and electoral support for those candidates. Thereby, it provides a better understanding of the linkage between the use of Twitter by candidates and effects on preferential votes. Two data sources are used to examine this relationship: first, a quantitative computer-assisted as well as a manual content analysis of tweets posted by political candidates during the Dutch national elections of 2010 (N = 40,957) and second, a dataset containing the number of votes for electable political candidates during that period. The findings show that using Twitter has positive consequences for political candidates. Candidates who used Twitter during the course of the campaign received more votes than those who did not, and using Twitter in an interactive way had a positive impact as well.