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October 8, 2015
Linking with Constituents: Presentation of Social Media on
Member of Congress Websites
Since Members of Congress first adopted social media, the
number of services to choose from has increased. Early
adoption was mostly on Twitter. Initial studies showed that
as Members became more comfortable with social media
and constituents came to expect that Members would be
using the technology, the number of Members on Twitter,
as well as other sites, increased. For example, in August
2009, 29% of Members had adopted Twitter as a way to
communicate with constituents. By January 2013, 100% of
Senators and 90% of Representatives had adopted Twitter.
As a communications tool, social media provides Members
with the ability to communicate directly with constituents in
a virtually instantaneous manner. In order for constituents
to find Member social media accounts, however, they may
need to either search for them using a general intemet
search engine or find the Member on a specific social media
application. In either case, searching for a Member of
Congress could be time consuming, might result in a list of
accounts that the Member is not actively using, and could
result in false returns (i.e., accounts for individuals with
similar names or a campaign account). Instead, an alternate
method exists for Members to promote their social media
accounts: providing a link from their official homepage to
the social media account.
Each Member of Congress has an official webpage on the
house.gov or senate.gov domain. On this webpage,
Members promote material that is germane to the Member's
official and representational duties. As such, many
Members, in addition to infornation on policy positions
and available constituent services, include links to their
official social media accounts. Examining the links from
Member webpages to social media accounts provides a
glimpse into the type of social media Members are adopting
and using, as it is likely that Members will only link to
social media services that they are actively using to engage
with constituents.
In July 2015, the Congressional Research Service (CRS)
conducted a survey of all 541 official webpages for
Senators, Representatives, Delegates, and the Resident
Commissioner. During the survey, CRS noted which social
media services were directly linked from the official
webpage. Additionally, information on the Members'
political party and chamber affiliation were recorded.
Overall, 17 different social media services were identified.
The most common were Facebook and Twitter, followed by
YouTube, RSS feeds, Flickr, and Instagram. Each of these
services had at least one-third of Members linking to them.
Additionally, numerous other services, including Vine,
Linkedln, Google+, Eventbrite, Scribd, Tumblr, Flipboard,
Picasa, Pinterest, Storify, and SoundCloud had at least one
Member who linked to his or her profile page.
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The survey showed that three services have been almost
universally adopted by Members of Congress. These are
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Figure 1 shows the
percentage of each chamber and political party that has
adopted these three services.
Figure I. Links to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
Member Websites, I 14th Congress, by Chamber and Party
% OF MEMBERS
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50%
F cebook Twittf Youube
U-Dem, HRep. ::SDem. SRep.
Source: CRS analysis of House and Senate websites.
House Members of both] parties link to Facebook (97%) and
Twitter (95%) at the same rate and almost at the same rate
for YouTube (93% for Democrats and 94% for
Republicans). In the Senate, Republicans link to Facebook
(9 1%) and YouTube (95%) more than Democrats (84% and
89% respectively). For Twitter, 95% of both Senate
Democrats and Senate Republicans provided links.
The number of links suggests that past trends in adoption of
Twitter and Facebook across party and chamber continue in
the 1 14th Congress. For example, in the 1 12th Congress
(2011-2012), CRS found that overall, 90% of Members
were registered with Facebook and 83% were registered
with Twitter. Broken out by party and chamber, 88% of
House Republicans had adopted Twitter and 95% had
adopted Facebook, while 80% of House Democrats had
adopted Twitter and 90% had adopted Facebook. In the
Senate, 78% of Democrats and 83% of Republicans had
adopted Twitter compared to 77% of Democrats and 81%
of Republicans adopting Facebook (CRS Report R430 18).
While previous studies of links from a Member's official
homepage to social media were not conducted, the
prevalence of links to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
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