Mitt Romney Buys His Popularity, Becomes First Campaign To Purchase A Twitter Trending Topic

The Twitter hashtag #RomneyRyan2012 was trending on Twitter today but unlike #GOP2012, #ObamaEastwoodMovies and #Reagan he had to buy his trending topic.

The ad purchase marks the first time a political campaign has purchased a promoted Twitter trending topic for voter outreach purposes.

The national trending topic debuted on Thursday night as Romney, Ryan and others took to the Republican National Convention stage to bash President Obama and speak about their established platform for the 2012 election.

On the surface the campaign seems to be working, as of 9 p.m. the #RomneyRyan2012 tag had received 10,000 unique tweets.

The hashtag buy is a smart move for the purpose of exposure as they appear on the Twitter homepage, exposing the campaign to millions of potential voters.

Twitter started selling local and national trending topics to businesses in December 2010 with the cheapest package costing $120,000.

The Romney campaign has taken to Twitter like crazy over the last several weeks, live tweeting the RNC from multiple accounts that focus on different parts of the GOP’s platform.

The movie towards better social media management is an important consideration for the Mitt Romney campaign, in 2008 John McCain fell behind in the social media race while President Obama used Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to start and maintain thousands of grass root campaigns.

Here is the trending topic list as seen on Twitter.com:

Do you think purchased a Twitter trending topic is a smart way to attract more voters or could hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations be spent better elsewhere?

[Romney image via Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com]