Well, I thought it was time to resurrect an activity I last did a number of years ago – in 2011 - during an Ontario election campaign. I tracked the number of Twitter followers each party leader had during the course of the election to see if the electoral outcome was correlated with social media presence as measured by the number of Twitter followers. I am going to do the same with the current federal election.
The week before the October 6th Ontario election, I had McGuinty (Liberal) with a 44 percent share of party leader Twitter followers, Hudak (Conservative) was next with 30 percent and then Horwath (NDP) at 21 percent and Schreiner (Green) at 6 percent. (See my September 28th 2011 post on Northern Economist at ldimatte.shawwebspace.ca/blog/archive/2011/09/). These shares were remarkably stable in the month leading up to the October 6th election.
McGuinty of course won the election albeit with a minority and the ranking of the parties in terms of seats followed the order of this Twitter ranking. McGuinty won the election with 42 percent of seats (and did so with 36.7 percent of the popular vote), Hudak’s party garnered 31.6 percent of seats (with 35.5 percent of the popular vote) and Horwath came in with 16.8 percent of seats (22.7 percent of the popular vote).
Of course one can debate as to whether Twitter had any effect at all on the Ontario election. On the one hand, one could argue that the number of Twitter followers simply measures core support and bears little relation to shifts in voter intentions. On the other hand, if there are changes in the number of followers in the wake of major gaffes or debate performances, then Twitter may indeed pick up shifts in voter intention.
So what do the federal party leaders look like in terms of their Twitter followers? Well, I am a little late off the mark in starting this given that I was out of the country when the election was called but Figure 1 shows what the number of Twitter followers was for each of the federal party leaders at about noon on August 13th, 2015. Harper leads the pack at 866,000 followers followed by Trudeau at 711,000. Surprisingly, third place is held not by Mulcair, but May with 168,000 followers. Mulcair comes next with 156,000 and then Duceppe with 86,100.
Figure 2 takes these numbers and constructs a percentage distribution of these Twitter followers– Harper has 44 percent followed by Trudeau at 36 percent and then Mulcair and May have about 8 percent each (due to rounding) with Duceppe last at 4 percent. Needless to say, these numbers would suggest that the race is not a close three way race as indicated by assorted polls to date – if anything it is at best a two way race between Harper and Trudeau. Still, we won’t really know til October 19th whether this was indeed the case or not. In any event, I will post an update of the numbers in a few weeks. This can be a fun way of dealing with what is going to be a long couple of months of electioneering.
I am very surprised at how low the number is for Mulcair. I thought that Mulcair's followers would be younger, more urban, educated, etc., and would be more likely to use this trendy hip new-fangled Twitter thing. Am I just so totally out of date that they have moved on to something even trendier? Or is Mulcair (or his Twitter-handler) just not very exciting at tweeting?
Posted by: Nick Rowe | August 13, 2015 at 07:00 PM
Given that Duceppe seeks followers only in french QC (in the West Island and ROC, if you could be an anti-follower, I am sure he would get some), the 86000 translate into almost 350K. Given that Twitter is less popular among francos than anglos, I just wonder what it might mean...
Posted by: Jacques René Giguère | August 13, 2015 at 10:42 PM
I just did a quick check on @pmharper. 7% of his followers are "fake", and 63 are "inactive", meaning that are totally disengaged from anything comes down the pipe, and probably have been for years. twitter followers is highly suspect data, as is social media data in general. Yes, you can do some powerful analytics with twitter, but followers ain't it.
Generally, I suspect that social media analytics is a black art that only practitioners who do it full time really understand. Lost of smoke and mirrors IMO.
Posted by: PederJakobsen | August 15, 2015 at 10:17 PM
Nick Rowe, you instincts are correct, twitter's not cool with the kids, and much less Facebook. It's all about Instagram these days. ;)
Posted by: PederJakobsen | August 15, 2015 at 10:33 PM
Obama had a superior internet campaign to H.Clinton in 2008. Both S.Harper and Obama had the best grassroots campaigns recently, but IDK if Twitter matters much. It would be nice if the United States gave the 3rd party a Cabinet appointment. his would introduce some dynamism into their system.
If I set up a site or consultancy here, it would include decided voters analysis. Maybe brain waves could be integrated into a political product as a sticker or hair berette/band.
Mrs Obama is big on veggie gardens and Prince Charles likes organics. I'd like to see gvmt subsidies and cooking shows devoted to cooking insects and forest type products such as inner pine bark.
I suspect a big problem with Twitter is that you can't explain your policies. I'm understanding why Law is such a political career: good logic and public speaking.
Posted by: Best Beta Trading | August 20, 2015 at 03:31 PM
I tend more towards following the parties that I don't like so I can be aware of the ways in which that devious party is brainwashing their loyal followers.
It is entertaining (and at times disheartening) to then see these talking points mindlessly reiterated in discussion boards, where people then talk total BS but think they are playing trump cards.
If there are a lot of people like me, then probably your indicator won't work very well.
Posted by: Nathan W | August 29, 2015 at 09:53 AM