Flagging Tweets Didn't Weigh Down Late Obamacare Enrollments

Nearly 1 million additional Americans registered for Obamacare health insurance coverage between the original close of enrollment on March 31 and Thursday, when the Obama administration announced late registrants had brought its tally up past 8 million enrollees.

That final surge took place without the massive social media push that defined the Obamacare campaign during its final, successful month in March.

During March 27 and 28, for example -- the Thursday and Friday before the enrollment deadline -- the White House’s official Twitter account tweeted or retweeted 24 times about Obamacare enrollment.

By contrast, the White House tweeted only four times about Obamacare on April 3 and 4. That was the Thursday and Friday after the deadline but when people were still completing applications or registering if they’d been shut out of HealthCare.gov during the enrollment surge.

A Nextgov analysis using the open social media tool Topsy tells a broader story. The Obama administration’s #getcovered hashtag was tweeted just under 17,800 times on March 31, the enrollment deadline, up from a daily average of about 5,823 during the prior week, Nextgov found.

During the week beginning April 1, the hashtag was tweeted an average of 790 times, or about 14 percent as much as the previous week.

Check out more details below. 

(Image via Kiev/Shutterstock.com)