After joining the social networking service in March, “SarahBrown10” has won the attention of more than 774,000 followers, outstripping the 768,000 following the comedian, who was long the UK’s most high-profile “tweeter”.
Mrs Brown has a long way to go before overhauling the biggest Twitter stars, like singer Lily Allen, who broadcasts her thoughts to more than 1.5 million via her feed at “lilyroseallen”.
But the army of fans listening into Sarah’s tweets amounts to almost five times the entire membership of the Labour Party.
Mrs Brown steers well clear of political controversy in her messages, granting followers glimpses into the day-to-day life of a Prime Minister’s spouse and publicising her favourite charities rather than promoting Labour policies.
Yesterday, she tweeted on the G20 dinner in Pittsburgh in the “lovely environment” of an organic farm, as well as urging followers to sign up to the “Million Mums” campaign against mortality in childbirth.
Since becoming a Tweeter six months ago, Mrs Brown has sent out 1,162 messages, which are each limited to a total of 140 characters.
Online public relations expert Ross Furlong said that Sarah’s tweets may help Labour, even though she never uses them for campaigning purposes.
“Although the content is deliberately not party political, she is effectively pressing voter flesh online, as she did in person at the Glenrothes by-election to great effect,” said Mr Furlong.
Politicians who have dipped their toes into the world of micro-blogging are trailing far behind Mrs Brown in the popularity stakes. London Mayor Boris Johnson has about 48,000 followers, while the official Labour Party twitterfeed has about 6,000 and the party’s “Twitter tsar” Bristol East MP Kerry McCarthy 2,700.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article