According to Dr. Ravi Singh’s research...

Twitterism as a communication practice reveals that who one is and what one says is not as important as how one says something and who engages with what is said. Society is measured by its leaders who continue to inspire and lead by their voice and tone.

Twitter

Twitter is a social networking and micro blogging service. Twitter defines itself as one of the oldest platforms that communicates what is happening. Beyond this definition, Twitter disrupts communication as a microblogging site allowing digital users to post short messages, photos, links, and other types of media 24 hours a day. The platform allows users to follow each other and share posts with visitors with a strict 280-character limit which used to be 140 characters.

What Twitter does

Twitter is one of the SMPs that offer socially collective communication, where the speaker and audience members are equal participants. Twitter can handle up to 18 quintillion user accounts, which means the numbers of opened accounts will never be enough and will instead continue to rise every other day. Twitter has 330 million monthly active users. Among the 330 million users, 67 million are in the United States, which means that one out of five people in America is on the SMP (Twitter). Prominent high-ranking leaders who use the social media platform are disrupting and defining how Twitter plays a role in their leadership. Twitter has grown exponentially over the years, and now has the ability to easily promote your brand and research, for example, by providing links to your blog stories, journal articles, and news items. Businesses are now able to create successful social media campaigns, to generate leads, increase sales, and boost brand awareness. Through a similar concept, Donald Trump sold his brand via Twitter, received positive engagement online and it was later transferred offline, which has now made him President of the United States.

Digital Rhetoric

Digital rhetoric is the study of how digital speech informs, persuades, and inspires action in an audience on a digital or multimedia platform. If SMPs are used to persuade audiences by posting messages, then digital rhetoric might be able to cultivate, analyze, and nurture a consistent feedback loop exchange between the leader and follower that could evoke a sense of tone. While digital rhetoric provides scholars with a broader context through which online communication happens. Social networks give users the ability to communicate across a wide variety of platforms using various media. Nevertheless, Digital rhetoric explains how this communication happens.

Social media engagement

Social media engagement refers to the process of measuring and analyzing a digital user’s participation at the opposite end of a social media communications feedback loop as a member of that social media platform.
Digital users interact by triggers of social media engagement (likes, retweets, and replies). Social media engagement is measured by analyzing a social media post/tweet to determine the number of public shares, likes, and comments mostly for a business account. Each of the social media platforms has its means of expressing appreciation for posts made, including following and retweets on Twitter, likes, and shares on Facebook, as well as likes and following on Instagram. Each of these reactions to content posted online is significant data used to measure social media engagement. If a tweet received a high number of either likes, replies, and retweets, it means that it has had a positive engagement and vice versa.

In summary, leaders are being judged by how they say things on Twitter, not just what they say. It is not just what one says; it is rather how one says it. This is because who one is and what one says is not as important as how one says something and who engages with what is said.