MPs on Twitter: Julie Anne Genter

Julie Anne Genter is a Green Party List MP. She is based in Auckland. She grew up in the US. She is the Green Party’s transport spokesperson.

 

Julie Anne is reasonably active on Twitter, but not as active as Russel or Metiria.

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Julie Anne is not scared to talk about what she is up to and when she feels nervous. This is a good thing. It helps to make her, and other MPs, more human.

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Nor is she scared of admitting she isn’t as young and fit as she used to be.

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When she tweets photos, they are good images, but there is not a huge number of images in her tweets.

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However, one thing I noticed in her tweets is that there is a bit of a negative tone showing through. Though this is something that I have seen more of from Metiria and Russel lately as well. (clarification: Julie Anne has said on Twitter that she felt this tweet was more funny than negative. Upon reflection I agree. Having seen similar comments on the image in the last few days I have become a bit jaded by them. Plus the negative reading of it could be more aimed at The Dom Post than at Don Brash. I stand by the comments about a more negative/confrontational tone in general from the Greens, but I wish make clear I am not suggesting this is a negative comment about Don himself. [there is an interesting discussion to be had about if this was a good choice of image by the Dom Post])

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One final thing about Julie Anne is that for an account associated with a real person, as opposed to a party account, she has a pretty high level of retweets in her tweets.

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Nearly 40% of her tweets are retweets. Over 30% of her tweets are replies, which I would normally say is a good thing. But when you add that together with the 40% of retweets it means that only 30% of her tweets are new content that is going to have the chance to be seen by all her followers.

 

To give you an idea of how concentrated some of her retweets are, here is a screen grab of her latest tweets, just before 9am on Tuesday.

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There is a place for retweets. But that needs to be balanced against producing original content and replying to tweets. Julie Anne has the replying to  people thing down, but if you are going to be retweeting the number of things she does, then there really needs to be more original content to prevent the appearance of you being someone who solely retweets stuff.

matthew