During the second week of the general election campaign Scottish leaders debated, Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party (SNP) hinted at another independence referendum, David Cameron ate a hotdog with a knife and fork, and Tony Blair resurfaced. Storyful continued to track the tweets of thousands of candidates across the United Kingdom during the week. Total tweets from candidates increased to just under 55,000.
Who was tweeting about Game of Thrones, which candidates got up early and stayed up late, which news sites were each of the parties sharing, and who was tweeting #AddABodyPartToAFilm? Storyful’s Peadar Grogan investigates.
In Numbers
54,844 total tweets from the candidates
515 tweets from Liberal Democrat @stevebeasant — the top tweeter during weeks one and two
26% — the percentage of tweets from Labour candidates
36 tweets per head from Plaid Cymru and SNP candidates
1,598 — the total number of tweets sent during the STV Scottish leader’s debate, the busiest period of the week
#LabourDoorstep — the most used hashtags of the week
#ScotDebates and #NHS — The most used hashtags after campaign slogans are removed
#AddABodyPartToAFilm — the most unexpected hashtag?
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
- Storyful’s database of candidates’ Twitter accounts is based on data from YourNextMP.
Candidates are people too
Monday, April 6, was a Bank Holiday in the UK, and despite a Conservative blitz on tax and pensions changes, the parties’ Twitter outputs reflected the holiday. There were a total of 6,647 tweets on Monday, 1,582 fewer than the average daily rate for the rest of the week, and fewer than the number sent on Saturday and Sunday. The graph below shows the daily Twitter output from the candidates, with each point on the graph representing a 15-minute interval.
The Scottish leaders’ debates on Tuesday and Wednesday nights were the most active periods of the week. Activity during the broadcasts didn’t come close to the traffic seen during the week one ITV leader’s debate, however, with a maximum of 1,598 tweets recorded during Tuesday’s live debate on STV.
And the candidates managed to miss the #MoustacheGuy meme that swept the internet on Tuesday night. Just two uses of the hashtag were recorded on that date, from Scottish Green Party candidate Sarah Beattie-Smith and SNP candidate Pete Wishart.
Early to bed
By looking at average hourly tweets on a party-by-party basis across the full week, we can track which candidates are most likely to get online early, or tweet into the early hours. The graph below show average tweets per hour, by party, over the course of the full week.
UKIP candidates tweeted later, sending 12.3 percent of their tweets between 11 pm and 3 am. The second latest tweeters, Independent and Other candidates, sent 11.7 percent of their tweets during that time.
Welsh Plaid Cymru candidates hit their strides earlier than others. They sent 13.3 percent of their tweets between 6 am and 9 am. Their closest competitors were UKIP candidates, with 10.3 percent of tweets sent during those hours. On the other end of the scale, SNP and Other candidates started latest. They sent 6.9 and 6.3 percent of their tweets respectively between 6 and 9 am.
Every party’s candidates reached peak-tweet between 9 pm and 11 pm. Labour, UKIP and the SNP all sent the most tweets on average during the hour ending at 11 pm.
Who’s tweeting #BadChoiceFuneralSongs?
The most used hashtags during week two didn’t throw up a lot of surprises. Each of the parties’ slogans and #GE2015 dominated the list. But removing those, we can see some of the issues that occupied candidates’ time.
Some of those hashtags may need an explanation. #ReadOnGetOn relates to a children’s literacy campaign, which the Liberal Democrats have supported. #ConstituencySongs, from “Sexual Ealing” to “Hove Will Tear Us Apart,” were trending during the second week of the campaign. #OLSX is a hashtag associated with the Occupy London movement.
Further down the list, a few unusual hashtags, including #BadChoiceFuneralSongs, #RuinADrink, #MarvellousMutts and #AddABodyPartToAFilm, were tweeted by election candidates.
It remains unclear what the Gordon Shrigley Twitter account was trying to say:
Game of Thrones returned to screens in the US on Sunday, April 12. The following candidates from Labour and UKIP were tweeting about it:
Also on Sunday, Hillary Clinton announced her intention to seek the Democratic nomination to run for US President. Clinton has supporters among the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. Labour candidates made the most use of Hillary-related hashtags. See a sample of who was tweeting about Clinton below:
The other parties were quiet on Hillary.
Unparliamentary language
Occasionally some of the candidates can get carried away in the heat of a Twitter debate. We looked at which candidates used strong language online. We recorded six uses of the word “fuck,” six uses of “shit” and two uses of “bastard” during week number two of the campaign.
So which party is the worst offender? The Green Party and Independents each have three strikes, while candidates from the Socialist Party, Liberal Democrats, English Democrats and the Pirate Party UK all used a swear word.
On the Scottish leaders’ debate, a Lib Dem candidate tweeted:
In a lengthy Twitter debate, the Respect Party’s George Galloway tweeted:
What the candidates are sharing
The most shared individual link from candidates during the second week of the campaign was an information sheet from Andy Higgins, an independent candidate for Blackpool, who sent the link to his followers 125 times.
Here are the top 10 most shared links across all candidates:
Andy Higgins aside, the Green Party’s election broadcast was the most shared campaign video during the second week of campaigning.
But which media sites are each of the main parties’ candidates linking to most often? The BBC, The Daily Mail, The Independent, ITV, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Sun, and The Times are widely shared by candidates across the board. Looking at just those sites, we tracked how often each party’s candidates shared content from them.
Which party leader has the most buzz?
During the first week of the campaign we tracked how frequently Labour and Conservative candidates were talking about each other’s party leaders. The graph below looks at how often seven of the top parties’ leaders are mentioned by their own party members, and by their rivals.
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?
The Others category includes independent candidates, Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), Sinn Fein, Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) candidates along with other candidates from small parties across the UK.
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.
