Grant Robertson is the Labour MP for the Wellington Central electorate. He is what I would consider a medium intensity twitter user. HE is currently sitting on just under 5000 tweets.
Grant is a very approachable person in real life, and gives off the same vibe on twitter. He makes a range of tweets from retweeting news stories relevant to people living in Wellington, to tweets about Roadworks and traffic issues in the city.
Grant actively engages with and replies to people who tweet him. Sometimes he does miss things due to the busy nature of being an MP, but will reply if you tweet him again. Grant is a great source of answers for specific policy related question. After the announcement of the Best Start policy by Labour, I was engaged in a debate with some people about it and how it might affect beneficiaries. Since no one was certain, I simply tweeted Grant and within 24 hours had an answer, which put to rest the debate. This is an example of how a single MP on twitter can have a decent impact on the roll out of a policy and how it is seen. In the past to find the answer we may had to spend ages digging through a policy document, which may not even have answered the question.
Grant also tweets things live from the House during Question Time, which makes watching Question Time, or following it if you can’t watch it, very entertaining.
Grant’s use of twitter includes a good use of images and hashtags to help attract people’s attention and get people to engage. The fact he tweets about things like going to the cricket, or to a concert, also help round out people’s understanding of him as a person, and make him more human.
Grant has been on twitter long enough that he has got one of the better grasps of how to use it and how to avoid the pitfalls. If I was to pick an opposition MP to hold up as an example of how to do things on twitter, Grant would be near the top of the list. He engages with people all around the political specturm, from the left and the right, from MPs and Ministers to the press. He puts his own personality out there and uses twitter to help grow his brand.
