The Most Popular Tweet Of The Republican Convention Was Sent By A Prominent Democrat Named Barack Obama

On the Web, cleverness often triumphs over brute force. And cleverness on the part of Barack Obama and his staff resulted in a bit of a tactical social media victory during the Republican National Convention, with a single tweet.

Twitter has confirmed that President Barack Obama's tweet that "This seat's taken" was the most retweeted tweet of the Republican National Convention. It's a reference to Clint Eastwood's instantly infamous "talking to an empty chair" speech at the convention (see video below), and it's brilliant. At the time of writing, it has been retweeted over 53,000 times and been favorited over 21,000 times. Here's the link to the original tweet: https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/241392153148915712

And here's Clint Eastwood's "#Eastwooding" speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DGl-4gByV4

It's very easy to count raw numbers surrounding social media. The Republican National Convention had many tweets about it by any standard, and certainly outdid its last convention: Over 4 million, to be exact. But this example shows that a little creativity can go a long way towards communicating via social media. Is there another of the 4 million tweets from the GOP Convention conveying such a powerful, memorable message within it?

More writing about Obama vs. Romney and social media in a nice post at TechCrunch.