A decade ago, almost to this very day, Donald Trump fired off his first tweet.

We didn't know it then, but it had all the hallmarks of the missives we've come to expect: Self-promotional. Capitalised letters for emphasis. A reference to himself in third person. And an exclamation mark at the end for good measure.

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It picked up a handful of retweets and likes, but at the time would have appeared entirely unremarkable. Isn't that the guy from the reality TV show?

How things have changed.

The US President now commands just shy of an impressive 60 million Twitter followers and deploys his 280 characters to devastating and controversial effect.

It's a headline-making, news-breaking stream of consciousness that riles his critics as much as it feeds his political base.

And yet, could he actually be losing the Twitter war?

We've scraped the data on @realDonaldTrump and found some worrying signs for the man who once broke the internet simply by tweeting "covfefe".

The tweet made a huge splash before later being deleted. ( Twitter: @realDonaldTrump )

Is Trump losing followers?

Last week Mr Trump invited Twitter's chief executive and co-founder Jack Dorsey to the White House and reportedly grilled him on why he was losing followers.

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It's been something of an obsession for the President, who has also accused the social media giant of being biased against conservatives.

Using the CrowdTangle analytics tool we have crunched the data to reveal the inner workings of the President's account, and why it isn't the number of followers he should be most concerned about.

For starters, he's not losing followers. At least not in overall terms.

In the past year, he has grown his list like clockwork, picking up an average of 160,000 followers a week at a healthy growth rate of 16 per cent.

Donald Trump's Twitter following over the past year. ( Source: CrowdTangle )

While there have been two occasions where he lost a chunk of followers in the past year (57,000 in one week last November and another 160,000 in a week last July), that's almost certainly a result of Twitter doing routine purges of suspicious accounts.

It's no reflection on Mr Trump.

So despite a concerted effort among his critics on Twitter to deprive the President of followers by spreading the #UnfollowTrump hashtag, it doesn't seem to be working.

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The data shows us that over the past year, Mr Trump's tweets have also appeared like clockwork, averaging 60 a week.

Plain text makes up the vast majority of his tweets (75 per cent), followed by videos (11 per cent) and then a smattering of article links and photos.

And Mr Trump continues to use the platform for everything from self-promotion to attacking his enemies, to announcing changes to decades-old US policy on the Middle East.

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"This is all about his base. That's exactly who he's targeting," NBC correspondent Sara James says.

"The goal is to get attention, to get noticed."

So what's the problem?

If the whole point of a politician collecting followers is so they can preach their message and expand their base, then this is where the data gets a little troublesome for Mr Trump.

Particularly when compared to some of his Democrat rivals who have set their sights on the 2020 election.

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One way we can measure how much Mr Trump's tweets are cutting through to his base is to look at the "interaction rate".

In simple terms, the interaction rate is a calculation of how many likes and retweets you get compared with your number of tweets and followers.

Think of it as a proxy for how much people are vibing with your content.

And Mr Trump has a relatively low interaction rate of just 0.21 per cent over the past 12 months.

What's more, this number is going backwards — dropping from 0.27 per cent over the previous 12-month period.

Mr Trump once rode a high of 0.55 per cent at the time of his 2016 election win, but soon faded and hasn't looked even close to reliving that past glory since.

The interaction rate on Trump's Twitter since October 2016. ( Source: CrowdTangle )

So as the President racks up followers, he's not necessarily gaining new supporters.

Enter the Democrats

In the past month, Democrats have been falling over themselves to announce their candidacy for the party's nomination to battle Mr Trump at the 2020 presidential election.

There are at least 21 candidates — including the most recent addition Joe Biden, who made the expected call late last week.

And in the last 30 days, each of these candidates has taken to Twitter to spruik their wares and explain why they are the ones to topple Mr Trump.

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So let's look at their data over that past month.

First, even their combined following barely cracks half of Mr Trump's, who despite the demands of his job remains one of the most prolific tweeters with 316 over that time.

Only two Democrats pip him, with 390 tweets apiece.

Andrew Yang — an entrepreneur whose campaign slogan is "humanity first" — and Senator Elizabeth Warren — whom Mr Trump has repeatedly sparred with on Twitter over the years and has assigned the derogatory nickname Pocahontas.

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But again, it's on the interaction rate where Mr Trump falls well short.

Going by this data, Mr Biden has more than 10 times the cut-through of Mr Trump — 2.58 per cent vs 0.21 per cent.

(Mr Biden served as vice-president to Barack Obama, who — as an aside — boasts 105 million Twitter followers and an interaction rate of 0.38 per cent in the past year. Something we could only assume would be a sore point for Mr Trump).

In all, Mr Trump comes 16th for interaction rate compared with all the declared Democrat candidates.

Eric Swalwell, a 38-year-old Congressman from California, has a staggering interaction rate of 6.14 per cent, while mayor Pete Buttigieg — a man who supporters herald as the new Obama — clocks in at 3.74 per cent.

And in a sign of the surreal, the man who comes in second, Mike Gravel, is an 88-year-old former senator who doesn't actually tweet himself, but apparently handed over his account to two teenagers from upstate New York who are taking great delight in writing snide comments to keep his campaign ticking over.

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So why does this matter?

In a country like the United States that doesn't have compulsory voting, one of the key challenges for a candidate is to get voters engaged and to the ballot box.

Mr Trump might enjoy having millions of followers, but that doesn't mean much if they're peppered across the world and made up of looky-loos and journalists on the POTUS beat.

If a rival politician with even a fraction of the followers can mobilise an engaged base on social media, it could build.

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And according to James, Twitter is no sideshow in the US.

"Does it play an important role? You bet it does," she said.

"Social media is an extension or part of media.

"It's almost like a loop between social media and media, each one driving the other and all of them becoming increasingly connected and visible."

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So it's not that Mr Trump is under threat of losing existing supporters on Twitter, but that some Democrats might be beating him at his own game.

And we're only talking about Twitter here — some of these candidates are throwing significantly more resources at Facebook and Instagram too.

"Trump likes to think that Twitter is his medium, but I would say this is an area where he may have a little bit of competition," James said.

"What we could see in 2020 if we've got some clever candidates, is an explosion of the potential for social media.

"And it's interesting: when you look at each of the different platforms, different people are suited for and better at different platforms, so I think Twitter is just the beginning."