After flatlining most of the month, Charlie Crist’s campaign has started to show some life on Twitter towards the end of January.  Nan Rich’s campaign continues to limp along, however.

But when you look at the charts, the power of incumbency becomes strikingly apparent.  In January, there was a 1 day peak for Rick Scott of over 13,000 mentions on Twitter:

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Over 12,000 of those mentions were in regards to a proclamation about sleep apnea. Still, even without that spike, we can see that at no point was Rick Scott really lagging in the conversation, and on almost every day he was leading it, sometimes strongly.

I’ll throw up a logarithmic plot so we can see what was happening to Crist and Rich throughout the month:

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What we can see is that towards the end of the month Charlie Crist was closing in on 1000 mentions a day — Rick Scott territory — while Nan Rich was struggling to stay above 10 mentions a day.  Let’s be clear, if you need a log plot to be seen, you’re in trouble.

The big uptick in Charlie Crist’s mentions occurred about January 20th, when Jim Messina joined the Crist campaign. As much of the discussion on Twitter was inside baseball, it will be interesting to see if the mentions keep coming once there’s no net new campaign organization news.

Charlie Crist is still flailing at Twitter, unfortunately.  In January, he averaged slightly less than one tweet a day.  Rick Scott, on the other hand, averaged almost 7 tweets a day.  It is a competition and Crist is still not showing up for the game.

Another, more mechanical problem is that Crist changed his Twitter user id from @charliecristfl to @charliecrist.   I’m not sure when it happened, but the way it was done is problematic.  People who are looking for and/or mentioning his old account are going to get lost in Twitterdom.  Yes, if you had followed his old account you will automatically be following his new account, but Charlie Crist needs to do a lot better than just to hang on to his old followers. And right now, if you google “Charlie Crist Twitter”, the first hit points you to his old user id — which someone has taken over and has zero tweets. That makes a bad impression.

Let’s hope, for Charlie Crist’s sake, that the recent hiring of Teddy Goff to advise the campaign is the start of a more savvy social media strategy.