Hillary Clinton presidential announcement: candidate hits the campaign trail with first of a million tweets

Mrs Clinton and her campaign will be a constant presence on social media

Hours after she announced in a video message that she was making another run for the White House, Hillary Clinton popped up in Pennsylvania – and on social media – with a warning of what is to come.

Having indicated she was setting off for Iowa on Sunday but that she had no appointments until Tuesday, Mrs Clinton explained the perplexing gap by by revealing she was taking the bus to the or the battleground state, stopping off to speak to people and posting the results on Twitter.

“Road trip! Loaded the van & set off for IA,” she tweeted. “Met a great family when we stopped this afternoon. Many more to come. –H.”

Get ready for more of this. From now until election day - assuming she is not beaten in the primaries – Mrs Clinton or one of her staff members will likely be filling social media with news, updates, snippets of information and more pictures of her encounters with so-called ordinary Americans.

Having been criticised during her 2008 campaign for appearing too stiff and too aloof, Mrs Clinton is determined to reach out to voters and make an effort to talk to them on their terms.

“I’m hitting the road to earn your vote,” Mrs Clinton said in the video released on Sunday to officially launch her campaign. “And I hope you'll join me on this journey.”

Her intentions may be genuine, but a problem for Mrs Clinton will be that the media – watching her every second and listening to every soundbite – will assume that every interaction she makes is planned and stage-managed.

Reports said that Ms Clinton had not intended to make her bus trip to Iowa public until someone spotted her and her Secret Service driver at a petrol station and telephoned CNN, but will people believe such a claim?

The Associated Press said that Mrs Clinton’s campaign team said she would spend the next six to eight weeks in a "ramp-­up" period, and would not hold her first rally and deliver a campaign kickoff speech until May.

Her two-day visit to Iowa on Tuesday and Wednesday will see her visit a community college and a family-owned fruit business, where she will sit in on round-table discussions.

On Tuesday, she will visit a branch of Kirkwood Community College in Monticello in the northeast Iowa, while on Wednesday she will be south of Des Moines at the family-owned Capital City Fruit company in Norwalk.