WASHINGTON — As the Internet exploded recently with the story of the 14-year-old Muslim boy arrested for taking a homemade clock that was mistaken for a bomb to his school in Texas, President Obama’s small army of social media specialists wasted no time.

From their office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Mr. Obama’s aides determined that the president should swiftly tweet about the clockmaker, Ahmed Mohamed, whose distraught expression and handcuffed wrists were feeding a national debate about ethnic and religious profiling.

“Cool clock, Ahmed,” Mr. Obama said in a message posted on Twitter hours later from his personal account, @POTUS, to his nearly five million followers. “Want to bring it to the White House?”

Although the president seldom posts his own tweets, and White House officials would not say who wrote the one about Ahmed, the tweet reflected a push at the White House to build up a social media presence for Mr. Obama in his own voice. The goal is to bring a sense of spontaneity and accessibility to one of the world’s most choreographed and constricted positions.