Twitter, the 15th most popular social networking platform (Dixon, 2022) is one of the world’s dominant political communication and campaign tools. Although there is a plethora of research on Twitter usage by political parties, many of the studies focus on economically and politically stable economies. Little is, therefore, known about the functions Twitter serves and the topics discussed by political parties using the platform in emerging democracies. This study addresses this gap by providing empirical evidence on the functions of Nigerian political party tweets, the frequency of Twitter usage, and the dominant issues Nigeria’s 18 registered parties tweet about. Evidence is presented which shows that the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Nigeria’s main opposition party accounted for the highest frequency of Twitter usage. The study also revealed Twitter as primarily a promotional tool for Nigerian political parties; and the 2023 elections, 2023 presidential flagbearers, and the state of the nation as the dominant topics discussed by the registered political parties. Our findings are an offshoot of a manual and computer-aided content analysis of 10, 097 tweets posted by the parties. This study is one of the first to offer critical insights into the role of Twitter in Nigerian political institutions.