Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Hillary Clinton’s “delete your account” moment was no fluke: Her tweet heard round the world was just the most viral example of her newly aggressive effort to take the 2016 fight directly to Donald Trump on his favorite social media turf.

After a long primary campaign in which Trump has used Twitter to pump out an endless stream of taunts at rivals and gobble up news coverage, Clinton’s campaign has rolled out a strategy in recent weeks to turn the presumptive GOP nominee's own words against him — with some sly sarcasm and snark. Her barbs may appear off the cuff but are sometimes planned and edited well in advance, making the Clinton-Trump war on Twitter an extension of the contrast between their distinct political styles: staff-driven and tightly scripted versus shoot-from-the-hip, aggressive and biting.

Thursday’s skirmish represented the peak Twitter moment of the 2016 campaign so far. When Trump tweeted out an attack on President Barack Obama's endorsement of “Crooked Hillary,” her campaign responded five minutes later with “Delete your account” — a time-honored social media jibe that quickly became her most popular tweet ever, with more than 420,000 retweets and over half a million likes by Friday afternoon. (That far surpassed the traffic of Trump’s infamous “Taco Bowl” tweet from Cinco de Mayo.)

Trump waited more than two hours to tweet a response to Clinton: “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up — and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?”...