【1977 Archives】

977 Archivesfirst lady of the United States twitter account is about to have a vacancy and, as of this moment, no one knows if incoming first lady Melania Trump will fill it.

Outgoing first lady Michelle Obama joined Twitter with a personal, though verified, account in 2011. It quickly amassed millions of followers. However, once the official FLOTUS account launched in 2013, Obama switched gears and stopped tweeting from her personal account.

Since then, Obama has used FLOTUS to give us a more personal view of life in the White House.

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It's how America got to know her, her husband and their children a little better. It's where she supported the issues she cared about as first lady, especially childhood obesity.

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True to form, her Michelle Obama's final FLOTUS tweets were personal and heartfelt.

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When Donald J. Trump is sworn in as 45th President of the United States on Friday, Melania Trump will become the nation's first lady.

She may pick up where Obama left off, moving into the FLOTUS account and using it to talk about her key issue: social media bullying. There is a chance, however, that Melania Trump will follow her husband's lead and leave FLOTUS empty.

Earlier this week, Mashablereported that Trump would probably keep tweeting from his personal account instead of the POTUS one Barack Obama favored (like FLOTUS, that account was created midway through Obama's second term).

Even if the former fashion model chooses to use FLOTUS, it's unlikely her engagement with it and her social media audience will be anything like Obama's.

Trump, who joined Twitter in 2010 and has over three-quarters of a million followers, is a relatively infrequent tweeter. Since joining the platform, she's tweeted just over 1,100 times. This is in stark contrast to her Twitter-obsessed husband, who has 34,000 tweets in eight years.

Michelle Obama wasn't exactly a prolific Tweeter on her personal account. She has just 766 in three years, but picked up the pace on FLOTUS with over 4,000 in three years.

There's probably good reason why Trump may be deciding against using POTUS and Melania Trump may follow suit. Neither account is wholly under the control of the president or first lady, respectively. Most POTUS and FLOTUS tweets are managed by Barack and Michelle Obama's respective teams. You know they personally tweeted when Michelle signs "-MO" and the president signs "-BO" on the tweets.

President-elect Trump likes his social media unfiltered. Perhaps the incoming first lady wants the same.

However, Melania Trump rarely tweets on her personal account and the majority of her feed is filled with retweets, photos, hashtags and emoji — and not many of her own words. She briefly picked up her tweeting pace when defending the Republican Convention speech she may have accidentally plagiarized from her predecessor.

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Whatever Melania Trump chooses after Friday's swearing in ceremony, tweeting from her personal account or the official one, FLOTUS on Twitter will not be the same. If it's a reflection of Melania Trump, it will be more slideshow than conversation. If she chooses to leave it alone, the Office of the First Lady will have to decide if it's going to use it at all.

No matter what, the FLOTUS account will be emptied on Friday and all of Michelle Obama's tweets as First Lady will move to FLOTUS44. It will be quite a social media legacy. What kind of Twitter legacy Melania Trump plans to leave behind is, at this point, anyone's guess.

Mashable has contacted members of the White House and Donald J. Trump's transition teams for comment and will update this story with their responses.