“DJ Rand Paul” responds to SNL on Twitter

When Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) was parodied in a “Saturday Night Live” (@nbcsnl) sketch, he playfully retaliated on Twitter.

The scene in the April 12 episode dissed possible GOP presidential candidates for not connecting with young voters and cut to “DJ Rand Paul” at the turntable playing “hip” music. The next day, the real Rand Paul turned the tables on “SNL” by playing along:

He adopted the “DJ Rand Paul” character on Twitter, asking for song requests with the hashtag #DJRandPaul and tweeting out a varied group of songs throughout the day.

Altogether, his DJ Tweets gained about 4,000 combined Retweets and favorites, and the number of new followers during that time was more than twice his daily average for the previous week.

The DJ tweeting started off as a playful rebuttal to a joke, but the social media-savvy senator used Twitter to make personal connections over music with constituents as well as the public at large. @SenRandPaul even made a joke about the NSA when he tweeted The Police’s classic “Every Breath You Take”, noting that it was the NSA’s theme song.

Of course, anyone requesting songs could have just listened online rather than requesting them from @SenRandPaul — but by embracing the “DJ Rand Paul” image, he created a community and conversation around music. He demonstrated that tweeting about popular music is a great way to identify with people and show some personality.

Do you know of other innovative uses of Twitter? Write to mediablog@twitter.com.