It’s official. As of about an hour ago Donald Trump is the 45th President of The United States of America.
One question regarding the transition was how the social media handoff would occur between outgoing former President Obama and President Trump.
And now about an hour in, some of these accounts are starting to switch over.
The most important one is probably @POTUS on Twitter, which now redirects to a new page for President Trump. While it only says he has about 4M followers now, this number will eventually creep back up to the almost 14M followers that former President Obama had on @POTUS, as soon as Twitter completes the migration.
Notably President Trump hasn’t tweeted anything from the @POTUS account yet, but has tweeted about 10 times in the last hour from his personal @realDonaldTrump handle. He did tell us to expect this though, since his personal handle has about 10 million more followers than @POTUS does.
And if you’re looking for the old POTUS, President Obama’s new Twitter is @POTUS44 on Twitter – and he still has his old tweets and followers from his old account. So if you followed @POTUS you’ll still be following President Obama on his new @POTUS44 account. He also has a personal account @BarackObama you can follow, which actually has over 80M followers – many more than he ever had on the @POTUS account.
The same happened to former First Lady Michelle Obama – Her @FLOTUS handed has been handed over to First Lady Melania Trump, and the former First Lady’s tweets and followers have been transferred to @FLOTUS44. She also asked followers to follow her new personal account @MichelleObama.
Similarly, Vice President Mike Pence has assumed control of @VP, and Joe Biden now has @VP44.
For a company that isn’t exactly the most organized right now (at least when it comes to the product department), Twitter has done a pretty good job of managing this transition – especially since it’s never been done before.
TechCrunch.om