In the 20th century, politicians were trained how to communicate through the 30-second TV clip.

In this century, it’s looking like communications success will be measured by the 140-character tweet — which explains why Canadian political parties have been getting some social-media coaching sessions from Twitter Canada.

Twitter, we learned last year, is becoming a dominant force in Canadian political communication.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office used Twitter to announce new cabinet jobs in the July shuffle and it is now the preferred, speedier medium for issuing statements to journalists from the PMO or ministers.

Take a look at the Twitter feed of New Democratic Party Leader Thomas Mulcair too in recent weeks. Using some of the lessons from the Twitter coaching sessions late in 2013, Mulcair and his advisers are now circulating pictures from behind the scenes of his travels, to show that there’s more to him than the guy we see asking hard questions in the Commons. He wears orange overshoes. Who knew?

During his campaign for the Liberal leadership last year, Justin Trudeau mostly dispensed with traditional press releases, in favour of announcements on Twitter or Facebook. Twitter also delivered the message last summer that Trudeau and his wife Sophie Grégoire were expecting a third child, due at the end of February or early March.

So when Twitter Canada folks arrived in Ottawa late last year to offer the political parties some lessons in how to use social media better, they were apparently greeted with eager students from across the political spectrum.

Here, according to some of the participants from the political backrooms, are among the lessons they learned:

Draw pictures: That old saying about a picture telling 1,000 words has been used to offer a way around Twitter’s tight, 140-character limit. If you would like your Twitter followers to look at facts you find interesting, you’ll have more success if you include a web link to an “infographic.” In plain language, that means stories told through charts or pictures. Tweets that include links to infographics apparently have a much wider reach than plain, old text-only tweets, the politicos were told.

It’s probably more than coincidence, then, that the prime minister’s Twitter feed has been loaded with infographics about the trade agreement between Canada and the European Union — an achievement that was buried in the traditional media under the fall’s headlines over the PMO-Senate scandal.

Someone working with the fledgling Toronto mayoralty campaign of David Soknacki seems to have heard this wisdom about infographics too and wants to use it in the debate over light-rail transit. Last week, Soknacki’s campaign manager Brian Kelcey put out a help-wanted sign on Twitter, complete with a new verb: “Volunteers needed to infographicalize (sic) the LRT fight.”

Say please: When you want people to recirculate one of your tweets — it’s called an RT, short for “retweet” — ask nicely, and ask in full. Yes, believe it or not, people have actually measured the reach of tweets that say “please retweet” or “please RT” and the one without abbreviations works better.

It’s somewhat heartening to know that good manners are rewarded in cyberspace, as is generosity. People who use Twitter to compliment others are also more likely to have more followers than those who use Twitter to rattle on about themselves with “look at me, look what I did” tweets.

Invite your followers “backstage.” Apparently people love to see politicians in non-predictable surroundings: away from the podium, in their private lives, living the story behind the story. Mulcair was rewarded with many retweets when he displayed his orange overshoes in a picture on Twitter, while Harper enjoyed huge success with his “day in the life” Twitter feed, showing him eating breakfast with his cat, Stanley, or reading files alone at his desk at dusk.

Despite this wholesale embrace of Twitter by the political class in Ottawa, it is still possible to find people in the capital who dismiss it as a passing fad or a time-waster. I imagine it’s similar to the grumbling and haughty sniffing that greeted the arrival of tape recorders and television cameras to the political communication business a half-century ago.

My only fear is that when Twitter folks came to Ottawa to teach the political communicators some lessons, they may have accidentally taken away some bad habits from the folks here — specifically in how to handle inquiries from reporters in the old-fashioned media.

Though Twitter promises that it will quickly reply to email messages sent to its press unit, I had no luck getting anyone from Twitter to talk to me by deadline for this column about the political-training sessions.

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Next time, I may just ask on Twitter — spelling it out with a big “please,” of course.

Susan Delacourt works in the Star's Ottawa bureau. Her latest book is Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (Douglas & McIntyre). It is available for purchase at StarStore.ca/delacourt

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