I’ve been taking a social media and elections seminar this semester with Raluca Cozma, a professor here at Iowa State. She’s been studying how candidates use social media for the last several election cycles and now is sharing it with us.

Cozma isn’t just telling us about her research. She’s also teaching us about research techniques and social media. This week she asked us to create a Storify with tweets from Super Tuesday. I decided to take a look how the candidates (or their staffers) used Twitter. Here’s what I found:

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Correction: Thanks to Stefanie Buhrman for pointing out that I did not move Colorado and Nebraska out of the Big 12. I updated the all schools table to reflect their departure. I also realized I missed adding Utah to the Pac-10 and it’s name change to the Pac-12. I updated this as well.

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Where did this summer go? A new school year is just around the corner, and that means a whole batch of new students. It might be a little early still, but I suspect many newspapers will see a surge in followers as new students arrive.

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the Iowa State University Class of 2015 Facebook page, and Twitter gets mentioned every few days. Many are listing their handles and following each other. Newspapers would be wise to notice these people and begin following, or even using their Facebook pages to promote Twitter accounts.

I haven’t added any newspapers to this list in a few months. If you know of one that I am missing, please let me know in the comments. Also, check out the list on Twitter to see what all of these papers are talking about.

The Top 25

The list had very little change this month. The Daily Californian was the only paper to move more than one place. Many of the papers simply traded places with each other. Hopefully we’ll see the competition heat back up as the school year resumes. Read more

Summer has settled in, and the numbers show it. Many newspapers had slower growth, with only one newspaper gaining more than 500 followers this last month. The Top 25 didn’t see a whole lot of change either. The addition of Onward State, who I wasn’t previously tracking, was the biggest change.

I’m interested to see if papers start introducing the Twitter follow button to their sites and what differences it makes. If you’ve got ideas about how paper’s should use the follow button, leave a comment below.

The Top 25

The only new addition to the Top 25 this month is Onward State, an alternative student news organization at Penn State. The paper has built up a strong following and had previously escaped my radar. It launched into the list at No. 12, four spots behind Penn State’s Daily Collegian.

USC’s Daily Trojan was pushed off the list to make room for Onward State. Read more