US President Barack Obama is to hold his first Twitter

US President Barack Obama is to hold his first Twitter "town hall" meeting, where he will answer questions posed by users of the micro-blogging website. He is expected use a live webcast to answer questions, submitted via tweets containing the hashtag #AskObama, on issues from jobs to the economy.

It will be held at the White House, streamed live on Twitter and moderated by Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey. A panel of users will re-tweet questions to choose those to be asked.
'Real-time' event

Roughly 30 of more than 2.2 million Twitter users who follow the White House account have been invited to the East Room for Wednesday's event. While these question-and-answer sessions are usually known as "town hall" meetings in the US, this even is being called a "Tweet-up" by the Obama administration.

"The purpose of doing this event is to try to find new opportunities to connect with Americans around the country," said White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips. Mr Phillips added that the Obama administration was particularly interested in taking advantage of the "real-time nature of Twitter to actually have a conversation and a set of questions that evolves" as the president speaks.

Thousand of questions have been submitted since late June, Mr Phillips said. Twitter said it would publish data about the event's online level of engagement once the digital town hall meeting had finished. In April, the president held a similar Facebook event at that social media giant's headquarters in California. A YouTube town hall was also held at the White House in February. The Obama administration often uses Twitter to break news and as a platform to connect with the site's users.