Many of Colorado’s leading candidates for public office are using Twitter and FaceBook as well as their web sites and e-mail to reach and communicate with 

their supporters.

E-mail is for private communications with family, close friends and business/professional contacts. Facebook is for reaching out to a broader audience of both old friends and new ones.

Politicians are using Facebook with varying degrees of intensity and success to build followings. And political junkies watch the politicians pages to see which ones have the most “friends” and are gaining and losing friends. We also watch to see how many people react to postings by the politicians, and how politicians interact with their “friends.”

Senate candidate Ken Buck responds to people who comment on his postings. Jane Norton doesn’t. Both Buck and Norton use Facebook and Twitter to make announcements and to attack Senator Michael Bennet.

Gubernatorial candidates Scott McInnis and Dan Maes use FaceBook to comment on the news and leverage their media appearances by linking to them. Like Buck, Maes responds to questions and comments on his page. See update below.

I have reported on comments that several candidates have posted on Twitter and FaceBook, and I’ve also commented when candidates suddenly stopped posting because it looked like they were changing their strategies or dropping out. Sometimes those signals can be misleading as when Tom Wiens stopped posting on Twitter for almost a month. He’s now back on the campaign trail. 

Once a candidate is on Facebook or Twitter, they’d better keep it up. If they stop posting or miss several days of posting, their friends, followers and competitors will wonder what’s going on.

UPDATE: I kinda baited Dan Maes into a Facebook interaction because I knew he would respond and we might get a conversation going on his Facebook page. In my opinion, he is exploiting FB for all it’s worth. He not only responds, but he also writes his own comments.