How To Track U.S. Congress Members' Tweets

How To Track U.S. Congress Members’ Tweets

Jan 19, 2012 at 1:38pm ET by Gary Price

Many U.S. Senators and Representatives are tweeting opinions, updates, images, documents, etc. these days, and Twitter can be a very useful, if not an essential tool, to learn about what’s going on directly from each member, especially regarding controversial legislation such as SOPA.

An easy to use but powerful web tool (it’s also free) named PolitickerUSA can save you a lot of time and effort informing you as to what members of congress are tweeting about right now.

In one location you can quickly access the non-stop real-time stream of tweets from Senators, Reps, President Obama, governors, and a few of the republican presidential candidates.

You can also filter the entire PolitickerUSA stream of tweets using a hashtag or word into the filter box. You do not have to click <enter>.

But Wait, There’s More

Here are a few other things you can do with PolitickerUSA.

1. Clicking any word or hashtag in a word cloud will run a search on Twitter for that hashatag or word.

2. Politician Trends allows you to quickly isolate and visualize the latest tweets from a specific politician.

3. A table of all politicians accessible using PolitickerUSA is available linking to their Twitter stream and providing their handle.

Kudos to the PolitickerUSA developer Brian for making the site available. You can read more about how he built the site here.

About The Author: Gary Price is a librarian, author, and an online information analyst based in suburban Washington, DC. He is the co-founder and co-editor of INFOdocket and FullTextReports.com and prior to that was founder/editor of ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. He has worked for Blekko, Ask.com, and at Search Engine Watch where he was news editor. In 2001, Price was the co-author (with Chris Sherman) of the best-selling book The Invisible Web. See more articles by Gary Price

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aeinhor

This is a very basic app. OhMyGov’s is far more sophisticated and has historical data going back two years @http://mediamonitoring.ohmygov.com along with news mentions, facebook data, and government agencies. Some of the data is free, but much of the good stuff is behind a paywall. But it’s worth it. GovTwit was better too, but that got shut down.