Twitter is increasingly becoming a medium through which constituents can lobby their elected representatives in... Show moreTwitter is increasingly becoming a medium through which constituents can lobby their elected representatives in
Congress about issues that matter to them. Past research has focused on how citizens communicate with each other or
how members of Congress (MOCs) use social media in general; our research examines how citizens communicate with
MOCs. We contribute to existing literature through the careful examination of hundreds of citizen-authored tweets
and the development of a categorization scheme to describe common strategies of lobbying on Twitter. Our findings
show that contrary to past research that assumed citizens used Twitter to merely shout out their opinions on issues,
citizens utilize a variety of sophisticated techniques to impact political outcomes. Show less
