Tulsa City Councilor GT Bynum is sworn into office as Mayor. SHANE BEVEL/For The Frontier
During his campaign for mayor, G.T. Bynum kept his distance from Donald Trump. Pushed by his opponent, former Mayor Dewey Bartlett, to say whether he would support Trump, Bynum refused.
Now he hears from the president-elect nearly every day.
“I have an alert set up so I get all of President-elect Trump’s tweets,” Bynum said. “Just because, you set everything aside, they are fun to read. All politics aside, you never know what you’re going to read.”
That’s right, Tulsa’s new mayor is one of Trump’s 16.9 million Twitter followers.
This does not mean Bynum, a Republican, supports everything Trump says in his tweets – that, he is clear about – but he has no problem with the president-elect, or any public official, using Twitter to get his or her message out.
“I think it’s great,” Bynum said. “Anything you can do to create a direct channel of communication between you and the people that you represent is, I think, a great thing.”
Some of Trump’s tweets have left the world all aflutter.
Like this one:
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
Or, more recently, this:
Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2016
Don’t expect the same verbal fireballs from @gtbynum. He tweets, retweets and replies to tweets, but his 4,474 Twitter followers – as of Monday – won’t find anything as controversial as what Trump’s millions have come to expect.
Wednesday Bynum retweeted an @emorybryan tweet about his three meetings with the City Council, and replied to a tweet from @JWPrairieDog.
But Bynum’s more of a Facebook guy, because he believes the format allows for more and better interaction with the public.
“In my experience, Twitter is not as interactive for me,” he said. “I find people are a lot more inclined to write comments or respond to something I post on Facebook than on Twitter.
“The media picks up Twitter stuff more quickly than Facebook, but (with) the citizens, the interaction is much better.”
Bynum used social media, especially Facebook, heavily in his campaign for mayor. And he has come prepared to use it now that he is in office.
A popular recent Facebook post of his, advertising a new welcome message at the Tulsa International Airport, was liked more than 1,000 times.
“I’m keeping my own (account),” he said. “It has been offered to set up a city account for me, but I like that direct access to people and the feedback and the great ideas you get.
Bynum said his grandfather, former Mayor Robert LaFortune, made a point of keeping his home phone number listed in the phone book.
“I view this (Facebook) as the 21st century version of that,” Bynum said. “Keeping my own Facebook page where I can interact with people and I am easily accessible to them, that is super important to me.”
Bynum is a big believer in the use of metrics to understand and address issues, and he expects to be judged on them as well.
So it will be interesting to see how his social media numbers turn out four years down the road. Today he has 4,474 Twitter followers and his Facebook page has been liked by 5,174 people (his personal account has more than 4,000 friends.)
That’s a far cry from Trump’s numbers, but, in fairness to Bynum, he’s only been mayor for two days.
