President Obama, the social media leader

In a world quickly becoming dominated by selfies, citizen journalists, overnight internet celebrities and viral gaffes, President Barack Obama has quickly learned that if he can’t beat them, he needs to join them. Social media was never his strong suit or anything that held interest for him outside of his election campaign teams, but over the last few months he’s made a dramatic transition to quickly become a social media master.

Granted, he’s President of the United States. As POTUS, he has the resources and skills to become the master of pretty much whatever he wants. Social media is a function of checks and balances when you have a team working on things and now that the President has started doing his own personal social media posting, it’s pretty certain that several eyeballs hit the posts before they hit the web. Can he become the first President to pull away from traditional media on which he has very little control and turn to social media where his team can have most of the control?

The Washington Post tackles the concept nicely in a recent piece:

The new strategy offers benefits as well as risks. The White House can reach more people without the filter of the traditional media, target its audience with precision and receive almost immediate feedback. But the approach raises the prospect of fostering further political polarization if the president opts to communicate mostly with parts of the electorate that identify with him ideologically or can be helpful politically.