When parliament was dissolved at midnight on March 30 we began tracking the tweets of thousands of candidates across the United Kingdom. In week one of the short campaign candidates sent more than 50,000 tweets. They tweeted almost 8,000 times during the ITV leaders’ debate, Labour candidates tweeted a lot more about David Cameron than they did Ed Miliband, and some candidates even tweeted about WrestleMania, Storyful’s Peadar Grogan writes.
In Numbers
3,849 Candidates*
650 Seats up for grabs
2,375 — The number of candidates active on Twitter*
39 — the number of total days in the #GE2015 campaign
54,905 tweets by candidates in the first week of campaigning
416 tweets from the Lib Dem’s @stevebeasant — the most by any candidate
26% — the proportion of tweets from Labour candidates — the top tweeters
36 tweets per head from SNP candidates — the most active campaigners
14% — the proportion of the entire week’s tweets crammed into the two hours of the leaders’ debate on April 2
7,962 — the number of tweets sent by candidates from the seven participating parties during the ITV #LeadersDebate
#LeadersDebate the most used hashtag during week one
#WrestleMania — the most unexpected hashtag?
721 uses of “Cameron” by Labour Candidates — 170 more uses than “Miliband.”
- Storyful’s database of candidates’ Twitter accounts is based on data from YourNextMP.
The Spike
What dominated week one?
The graph above shows tweets, per 15-minute period, across seven days, from just after 1 am on Monday March 30, to 12:59 pm on April 5. Tweeting patterns were consistent day to day, except on the night of Thursday, April 2. The ITV leaders’ debate dominated social media during the first week of the campaign. See here for more on the specifics of the debate.
Who was tweeting?
Labour Party candidates make up the largest list in our data set, with 566 tweeting candidates. The 28 tweeters from Plaid Cymru make up the smallest tweeting candidate group. Plotting tweets per head shows a very different story:
Here we can see that the Scottish National Party’s candidates are the most active on Twitter, with 36 tweets per head over the course of the week. Labour’s candidates manage to hold their own, however, with slightly more than 25 tweets per week.
When were they tweeting?
This graphs shows the cumulative weekly tweets of each party’s candidates, expressed as an hourly value. Ignoring the obvious distortion caused by the leaders’ debate, candidates are tweeting from the moment they wake (tweets ramp up between 7 am and 8 am) and then remain largely constant throughout the day.
The Top Tweeters
Drilling down into individual candidates’ accounts we can see the top individual tweeters. The Liberal Democrats’ Steve Beasant is a candidate for Great Grimsby and is a councillor for the East Marsh. His Twitter account is very active, regularly posting links and images to drive engagement. Beasant has a habit of resharing older content, however, such as in this example.
You can find the top tweeters’ accounts here:
Liberal Democrats’ Kavya Kaushik
SNP’s Natalie McGarry
Plaid Cymru’s Vaughan Williams
UKIP’s Rog Tallbloke
Labour’s Jess Phillips
The Green Party’s Lee Williscroft-Ferris
Respect Party’s George Galloway
The Green Party’s Murray Sackwild
Labour’s Karl Turner
Looking at the top tweeters by party (including Others) we get the following:
What were they saying?
We’ve pulled out the hashtags that candidates were using during the first week of the campaign. Unsurprisingly, #LeadersDebate dwarfed all of the other hashtags used in the first week of the campaign. After that, the candidates dug in along party lines, with hashtags such as #VOTESNP or #labourdoorstep dominating.
WrestleMania 31 took place in Santa Clara, California, on March 29. The hashtag #WrestleMania was used by two Green Party candidates and one Labour candidate. Three independent and other party candidates also tweeted about WrestleMania.
Labour candidates mentioned David Cameron’s name 721 times during the week. They only mentioned Ed Miliband 551 times. On the other side, Miliband won. His name was used 597 times by Conservative candidates, versus 533 uses of Cameron.
What were they sharing?
Some of the week’s biggest stories leap from the data when the most shared urls are isolated. The Telegraph’s report that the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon had privately indicated that she backed David Cameron for prime minister was one of the biggest stories on the Friday of that week. Zero hours contracts became a talking point when Labour’s Ed Miliband pledged that Labour would severely restrict their use. Martin Freeman appeared in Labour’s first election broadcast. All of these, along with links to party websites and other articles, made the top ten most-shared links.
Top Shared Links By Party
See what the parties’ candidates were sharing below:
Conservatives — Conservatives’ Website
Labour — The Telegraph: Sturgeon backing Cameron Leak
Green Party — The Telegraph’s Twitter tracker
Liberal Democrats — Liberal Democrats’ Website
UKIP — Amazon link to Great British Eurosceptic Immigrant by Przemek Skwirczynski
Plaid Cymru — Plaid Cymru website
SNP — SNP website
Other — My MP YouTube video: What if Politicians Worked for Us?
How We Did It
Sources and sorting
We monitored the Twitter activity of candidates across all of the UK. Using information obtained from the YourNextMP database, we sorted candidates’ Twitter handles into lists based on party. We then tracked these lists over time to determine: Who tweeted when? What hashtags were being used? What links were candidates sharing?
Caveats
We are working to identify original tweets sent directly from candidates. As such, Storyful’s dataset excludes direct RTs — retweets sent by hitting the RT button — but manual, copy-and-paste retweets have not been excluded.
We also haven’t accounted for poor spelling. The hashtag #labourdooorstep, for example, was used a surprisingly large number of times (74, in fact). We haven’t included those in our analysis of the #labourdoorstep hashtag at this time.
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