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President Barack Obama finally has his own Twitter account.

“Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack,” his first tweet read Monday. “Really! Six years in, they’re finally giving me my own account.”

With just a few typed words, it appears that Obama becomes the first sitting U.S. president to announce his own Twitter account, from which he actually tweets himself.

Obama had over 30,000 followers within 10 minutes of sending his first tweet. (His total as of Monday night – 1.4 million followers) The White House said @POTUS tweets would come “exclusively” from Obama. A White House staffer confirmed to The Huffington Post president personally typed and sent the tweet from a phone.

“The @POTUS Twitter account will serve as a new way for President Obama to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him,” the White House said in a statement. “President Obama is committed to making his Administration the most open and participatory in history, and @POTUS will give Americans a new venue to engage on the issues that matter most to them.”

Obama is already known as the high-tech president and is very savvy when it comes to social media. Last month, Obama announced a program to provide more Americans with the training needed to secure jobs in the high-technology industry.

The President said there were more than 500,000 job openings in such fields as software development and cybersecurity and that the average salary in jobs requiring information technology skills was 50 percent higher than the average private-sector job in the United States.

In the weeks ahead, Obama could share his thoughts about America’s high-tech opportunities through communications on Twitter. And just for the record, First Lady Michelle Obama had her Twitter account long before the President.

Here’s the official White House announcement:

Dear Friends,

Today, with a tweet from the Oval Office, President Obama launched @POTUS, the official Twitter account of the President of the United States. The @POTUS Twitter account will serve as a new way for President Obama to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him. President Obama is committed to making his Administration the most open and participatory in history, and @POTUS will give Americans a new venue to engage on the issues that matter most to them.

Will you be following the President on Twitter? What would you most like to ask him?

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