web design

This Election in Social Media

October 02, 2011 |Let's Tweet

With Election Day coming tomorrow, I've decided I would update my previous numbers on how the different parties did in terms of adding friends and fans on Facebook & Twitter. In order to make a political social media campaign successful, you need hard numbers. As such, I'm not going to weigh out the percentages but will add another column for how many friends, or fans, or followers; Depending on the platform of course.

By "New" I simply mean new since my last blog post.

Party	Leader	+/- Friends(+/- Party Fans)
Liberals	Robert Ghiz	1 (82)
Conservatives	Olive Crane	130 (64)
Green Party	Sharon Labchuk	46 (20)
NDP	James Rodd	4 (21)
Island Party	Billy Cann	Unknown (4)

Now for some Twitter numbers, how did each of the parties do? Well, not every leader is on Twitter. Or some parties are represented by their leader. As such, If it's NA, that means they or the leader does not have a party. Again, these numbers are the new followers/following that the party has gathered since my previous post.

Party	Leader	+/- Followers(+/- Party Followers)
Liberals	Robert Ghiz	NA (67/112)
Conservatives	Olive Crane	-1/30 (33/63)
Green Party	Sharon Labchuk	1/57 (NA)
NDP	James Rodd	NA (0/32)
Island Party	Billy Cann	NA (2/19)

An interesting stat here is that Conservative leader Olive Crane dropped by 1 follower and yet they added 30 new followers and yet, there's been no twitter updates.

I wouldn't say there has been much real social media outreaching by the parties during this election. While some candidates, who normally tweet, are still doing a good job, there didn't seem to be an active push towards the virtual canvassing. I would take a guess that this is moreso due to a lack of strategy by the parties.

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