Just 4 Days: Buhari’s Twitter Followers Already Over Half Of Jonathan’s Twitter Account Created 4 Years Ago

The @ThisIsBuhari Twitter handle of General
Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the
All Progressives Congress (APC), has amassed over
45,000 followers in just four days by contrast, President Goodluck Jonathan’s @JGoodlucktweets, which is four years old, has just about
40,000 more followers.

Jonathan created his Twitter account exactly 1,634 days ago,
on July 6 2010, and now has 84,800 followers. The account
appears to have stopped growing, as it has been in the region
of 84,000 since he declared his run for a second term a few
weeks ago. Buhari’s account was created on Dec 22, and had by the
afternoon of December 26, Eastern Standard Time, amassed a
following of 45,200.

It is also of interest that in the past four years, President
Jonathan has tweeted only 129 times, about two tweets per
month. His last tweet appeared on November 11, 2014.
In comparison, Buhari has tweeted 55 times in his four days
on Twitter, his last one appearing yesterday, December 25,
2014.

Buhari’s running mate, Yemi Osinbajo, also got into Twitter
two weeks ago, on December 10, and his followers are now up
to 25,000.

Vice President Namadi Sambo, who is also running for a
second term, has an even older Twitter account than President
Jonathan’s, but although his account was created in February
2010, he has only 3,188 followers.

When running for office in 2010, President Jonathan was very
active on Facebook and Twitter, which he used to lure
younger voters. After the election, when the same supporters, some of whom said they had voted to him but not the PDP, began to demand
accountability and productivity, they were quietly ignored by
President Jonathan.

As their agitations mounted on social media, in August 2012
President openly denounced them through spokesman Reuben
Abati, who in an article called them “army of sponsored and
self-appointed anarchists,” competing among themselves to
pull him down.

Jonathan included in the demographic “all the cynics, the
pestle-wielding critics, the unrelenting, self-appointed
activists, the idle and idling, twittering, collective children of
anger, the distracted crowd of Facebook addicts, the BBM-
pinging soap opera gossips of Nigeria.”
It is an assault the very vocal group does not seem to have
forgotten.

The question is, does more twitter followers mean more voters?