As we head into the political season, I thought I should highlight some of the candidates that I follow on Twitter, as this Follow Friday (#FF) post. For those who are Twitter regulars, hashtags, like #ff, #ct, and #politics are ways of marking topics when you have only 140 characters to use, and Twitter accounts regularly start with an at-sign to indicate they are twitter accounts.

I’m starting off with @ChrisDonovanCT. Chris is running for Congress in the fifth district and this is his campaign Twitter account. He will be opening his campaign headquarters in Meriden this evening after starting his tour around the district this week.

There is a site called Klout which measures the influence a person has on Twitter. It is a scale of 0 to 100, and Chris’ Klout currently comes in at 29.

Next, is @ChrisMurphyCT. Chris Murphy is currently the Congressman from the fifth district and he’s running for U.S. Senate. I ran into Chris last week at an even in New Haven. He says that he’s been working on his social media and his campaign twitter account has a Klout score of 50.

Joe Courtney has two Twitter accounts that I follow. One is his reelection campaign twitter account. It has a Klout score of 1, with only 167 followers and hasn’t been updated since February. His Twitter account as Congressman, @RepJoeCourtney has is much more active and has a Klout score of 48.

At the end of the list for today is @BlakeForMilford. Friends of mine live in Milford and had been asking me about Ben’s online presence. @BlakeForMilford only has 25 followers, hasn’t been updated since July, and doesn’t even have a Klout score yet.

For those of you who don’t want to follow the politicians directly, there is always the Journal Inquirer with over a thousand followers and a Klout score of 31 and @CTNewsJunkie with over 3000 followers and a Klout score of 43.

These days more and more politicians are using Twitter to get their message out. President Obama mentioned Twitter in his speech last night, so it remains More and more news organizations are using Twitter to highlight their headlines, and everyone can benefit from this by checking out specific Twitter accounts, even if they choose not to tweet themselves.