Romney campaign denies rumor they bought Twitter followers

Mitt Romney's campaign on Monday quickly rejected suggestions from a social media consultant that they were buying Twitter followers.

The presumptive GOP nominee's official Twitter account saw a sizeable jump in followers over the weekend, according to tracking data compiled by 140Elect.

"Romney was gaining around 3000-4000 new followers per day for the past month," wrote co-founder Zach Green, noting the spike in a blog post on Saturday. "Yesterday he acquired 23,926 new followers and is climbing well over 75,000 today."

Green also noticed that Romney's engagement — such as his mentions and retweets — had not changed over the past 24 hours, meaning his campaign wasn't putting extra outreach effort into his account in order to get the followers.

"I’m not saying he bought them, but Romney’s follower stats have taken a sharp and sudden rise since Friday 5PM EST," Green wrote. 

Romney's campaign on Monday denied those claims.

"We have reached out to Twitter to find out additional information regarding the rapid growth," Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaign's digital director, told BuzzFeed.

Either way, Romney is finally starting to catch up to President Obama's more active Twitter feed. Romney currently has 817,777 followers compared to Obama's 17,776,992.

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