One of the hardest things for a presidential candidate in the United States is the amount of money needed to compete. It was the downfall of Bachmann, Huntsman, and Perry. Those candidates had enough money to stay in the first 3 primaries/caucuses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. But once it got to Florida it became a big boy race and only the candidates that did well in those 3 states even had the money to stick around.

In wake of everything that has happened, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has turned to social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to get the money he badly needs to continue. “This is part of how we’ve survived against Romney, frankly. He raises lots of money off Wall Street and we reach out through the Internet, so we can run a very inexpensive campaign,” Gingrich said in Savannah, Georgia, on March 2.

Gingrich has even gone as far as to hire a “Digital Media Consultant” to help him with things such as a website redesign and more agressive Twitter campaigns such as the #250gas campaign. “I stepped in to a campaign that was very well-versed with everything online, they just didn’t have the people resources,” said Vincent Harris. Harris had previously worked for Governor Rick Perry’s presidential campaign.

One of the problems that people had with John McCain is that he seemed to ‘out of touch’ with the younger generation. Gingrich seems to be trying to buck that trend by embracing what social media has to offer. “On Twitter if you go to hashtag $250gas and just put that in, that’s a whole new group that we’re building around so we can Twitter and we can send out tweets,” Gingrich said in Tupelo, Mississippi. “For those of you who don’t know about Twitter, you send out tweets to ‘tweeples’ so everybody who’s on Twitter is a tweeple.” He isn’t totally social media savy, but he is beginning to realize the importance of it.