Obama joins Twitter with official account

After six years in the nation’s highest office, President Barack Obama is now taking up residence on Twitter.

Using the official handle @POTUS, Obama broke the news Monday morning with his first tweet. Within an hour, it gained 43,000 retweets and 44,000 favorites.

Since March 2007, Obama used the handle @BarackObama, which according to the account bio is currently overseen by the Organizing for Action staff. Official presidential tweets on that account were signed “-bo”.

Obama’s new account had almost 400,000 followers as of noon on Monday.

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