President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign could get a social media boost after some major changes announced today.

The big news: the president himself will be tweeting on occasion, according to TechCrunch. Each presidential tweet will be signed “-BO.”

To this point, Obama’s White House staff has been posting for him to @BarackObama. He’s joked in the past about having never tweeted (though he did technically tweet this), but that will soon change.

Also notable is that the President’s 2012 campaign staff will start managing his Twitter and Facebook accounts, effective immediately, rather than the White House staff.

The announcements were detailed in a blog post on Obama’s campaign website, which notes the re-election campaign is underway and Obama is “counting on all of us to lead this organization from the grassroots up.”

More frequent updates are expected too, per The Next Web. Obama for America vows to post “daily updates from the campaign trail, from Washington, and everywhere in between.” The group also asks for feedback and ideas on how to best utilize the Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Obama hasn’t sent a personal tweet yet, but his stream will indeed be one to watch. And Twitter could play a significant role this election season, as TechCrunch notes:

If the 2008 election was about Facebook, the 2012 election may also centralize around Twitter, which has more mass appeal than four years ago. Obama and his campaign are wise to start engaging constituents and citizens personally. In fact, Republican candidates are already starting to throw punches and jabs over Twitter. The fact that Obama will now be actually Tweeting from the account will add a ton of value to his stream.

(Source: Huffington Post)