Hillary, delete your account

Hillary Clinton is doing very well in the race to become the next president of the United States. According to Nate Silver, her chance of winning is now only 83,5%.  But, there’s always room for improvement. In this short blog, I will give three suggestions regarding Hillary’s Twitter use.

1    3. Stop tweeting like a woman

In her blog, Karmen states that Hillary Clinton ‘’tweets like a woman’’. In her tweets, Clinton must balance between masculinity and femininity. But, according to research by Dolan (2013), people don’t let their evaluation of a candidate depend on whether this candidate is a man or a woman. The ‘’high expectations’’ that would be put on Clinton are not actually there. So, there is nothing to be afraid for Clinton, regarding her gender in relation to the opinion of the people. She can just tweet freely whatever she wants.

2.    2. Start tweeting like a human

Karmen also says that: ‘’The necessity to comply with all the demands has definitely made Clinton's interactions with public less interactive compared to that of Donald’s: she has securely stuck with one-way communication.’’ Regarding this one-way communication, I agree with Valentini (2015) that such a form of communication leads to ‘’pollution’’ of the internet. Twitter can be a beautiful medium just because of the possibility to communicate directly to each other – not because it can be used as a wall full of advertisements. Clinton has a very large staff, so why just not give some more team members Hillary’s password and let them speak with the fan base (or even their enemies)?

3.       3. Add some humour

If you go to Hillary’s timeline, then you will see that it’s all so serious. And that’s a shame – not only for us, but also for Clinton itself. Tweets with a little bit of humour in it are generally receiving a bigger audience than tweets that do not contain any humour. Freelon & Karpf (2015) state that ‘’fifty-eight per cent of the most-duplicated tweets across both debates contained humour.’’ So Hillary would be wise to also give her funniest staff member the password of her account, because there’s a lot to gain out there. I can only remember one tweet of hers that was kind of funny, when she commented on one of Donald Trump’s outraging tweets: ‘’Delete your account.’’

Arnout Maat (#10003310) studied history, political science and political communication at the University of Amsterdam.