330. You can follow them all on this list - @tweetminster/ukmps . On our lists page you can also find MPs listed by party, while here on our site you can search for MPs by constituency to find out if your MP is on Twitter.
When we launched Tweetminster back in December 2008, there were only four MPs using Twitter.
When Tweetminster launched in December 2008 there were four MPs on Twitter. As we approach our third birthday, here is a look at how the political landscape on Twitter has evolved over the past 12 months.
At the beginning of the year there were 234 MPs on Twitter. There are now 315. On our lists page you can find lists by party.
The 5 most followed MPs are:
@Ed_Miliband
@DMiliband
@nick_clegg
@williamjhague
@tom_watson
The 5 MPs that have tweeted the most over the past year are:
@Tom4Scotland
@kerrymp
@julianhuppert
@LouiseMensch
@stellacreasy
The top-10 trends among MP tweets in 2011 were:
Jobs
Schools
NHS
BBC
Police
Cuts
PMQs
AV
David Cameron
Europe
The “most mentioned” MP in 2011: @LouiseMensch
Yesterday we launched a “Newstweet Index” with @PortlandComms that aims to analyse on a quarterly basis how British media uses Twitter - what media organisations and journalists tweet about, how often they tweet and who leads the conversations around news (i.e. who do people pay attention to the most).
As part of our analysis we also looked at what media organisations and journalists use to send their tweets - what the more than 330,000 analysed tweets were sent with - here are the results:
Web (Twitter.com) - 31%
TweetDeck - 24%
Twitter for iPhone - 13%
Echofon - 6%
Twitter for BlackBerry - 5%
Twitter for iPad - 3%
HootSuite - 3%
Twitter for Android - 2.5%
UberSocial for BlackBerry - 2%
Twitter for Mac - 2%
Others - 8.5%
You can find out more about the index over at Portland and on our Lists page you can find and follow the journalists and media organisations we tracked and analysed.
When we launched Tweetminster at the end of 2008 there were four MPs on Twitter. There are now over 300. 305 to be precise, or about 47% of all MPs.
You can find and follow them all on our Lists page on Twitter, where you can also find lists for MPs filtered by party and lots more.
Storyful, the social media news agency, and @Tweetminster, the media platform that uses data to curate news, trends and opinion have announced a partnership to collaborate on existing services and co-develop future products.
Through the partnership, @Storyful and @Tweetminster will integrate their respective technologies into each others’ B2B commercial services, effectively leveraging on each others’ sales pipelines.
The two companies have also announced plans to co-develop a new application that will be launched over the next few months.
Storyful uses journalism and curation to filter through social media and organise content and lists around breaking news events and topics, while Tweetminster’s technology analyses networks to identify and organise trends and content that is being shared by groups of experts and influencers around any topic, industry or market.
Together, Storyful and Tweetminster, aim to provide publishers with relevant and timely content and insight into news events, industries and topics, and users with the best and most useful content around their personal and professional interests.
Mark Little, Founder and CEO of Storyful, said “Storyful helps newsrooms discover, verify and deliver the most valuable news content on the social web. The key to success in real-time news curation is the right combination of human skill and technology. As we try to perfect that blend, we can think of no better partners than Tweetminster. Together, we plan to build pioneering tools that help any journalist sort the news from social media noise.”
We at Tweetminster are really excited about partnering with Storyful, the synergies between the two companies are rather unique. Tweetminster’s goal is to provide people with the most relevant, insightful and useful content around their personal and professional interests. We believe that both human expertise and technology are needed to do this in a way that is insightful and scalable at the same time. By connecting the dots between our complementary skills and technologies, combined with a common vision, we will together have the potential to develop very powerful media products.
We’re delighted to announce the launch of the official Tweetminster iphone app. Version 1.0 is live with all the features you’ve come to expect from our dynamic news platform, plus introduces the beta version of our live trends engine - giving you the keywords and trending topics dominating UK politics news stories.
The app gets you quality news content from websites, blogs and social networks in one place on the move.
The Tweetminster app features:
Top news stories of the moment aggregated from across the web and social networks
Customisable news page showcasing the top news stories from the web and social networks
Live Feeds of relevant Tweets from our expert networks
Post, reply and retweet with experts in the Tweetminster Live Feeds by logging into Twitter from within the app
Filter news stories and Tweets by topic
Analyse data around the most discussed trends from the past 24 hours
Data landscape mode presents these trends as a bar graph
Qriously Real-Time Sentiment Polling – be an influencer and make your opinion count
You can download the app here.
We have more features already in the pipeline, so let us know your thoughts and feedback in the comments here or in the app store so we can continue to build tools that make sense out of the online news buzz.
As a reminder, if you’re using an iPad, our HTML5 website is optimised for tablets, so even without the app you can still get Tweetminster on your mobile device for live news and analysis.
For our latest infographic, Tweetminster has teamed up with Portland to visualise Twitter buzz about the AV referendum by comparing the average tweets per hour of several events:
#Yes2AV and #No2AV tweets on April 27: 232.5 TPH
C4news 19:00 edition on April 27: 129 TPH
Britain’s Got Talent on April 30: 64,836 TPH
BBC Newsnight edition of April 27: 466 TPH
#Libya tweets on April 28: 1,032 TPH
#Syria tweets on April 28: 2,554 TPH
Royal wedding tweets tracked between 8:45-12:45 on April 29: 514,845 TPH
The purpose of the infographic is to show conversations about AV within the context of a range of different events. Unsurprisingly, the royal wedding and global news items, like Libya and Syria, have significantly higher volumes, the data shows though that the AV referendum hasn’t captured the imagination of many beyond the Westminster village.
In fact, more people tweet during an edition of BBC Newsnight than about AV. The Twitter activity of both is significantly smaller than a popular “national event” - the latest episode of Britain’s Got Talent.
On the plus side, AV excites people more than bond curves.
For a hi-res version of the infographic, click on the visual above, or here to download a .pdf
Tweetminster and Qriously, a service for measuring location-based public sentiment in real-time, have announced a partnership that will bring Qriously’s real-time sentiment polling to UK politics.
To kick-off the partnership, Qriously and Tweetminster asked 1,204 random UK-based smartphone users a series of questions around the upcoming AV referendum:
The majority of those asked understands the current voting system;
Almost one-in-two is confused by the alternative vote;
52% of those questioned said they will be voting NO to AV;
London was the only city where the Yes vote received more preferences.
In summary, despite the random sample and the fact that the questions were targeted exclusively to smartphone users, the answers are fundamentally in line with recent polls - a significant number of people don’t fully get AV and for this reason are likely to stick with a voting system that they understand.
The questions were asked on April 13 over 14 hours.
Throughout the month of February Tweetminster analysed 82,340 tweets posted by UK media sources and journalists on Twitter.
This infographic visualises what they talked about. It aims to display each source’s level of activity on Twitter and the attention that each source gave to different news stories and topics during February 2011.
A list of accounts for each source can be found at http://twitter.com/tweetminster/lists.
These are some of the findings that we found most interesting:
1) Sky News is the most active news source among UK media on Twitter.
2) While as expected most top stories are common across all news sources, there are insightful differences between each source.
3) The Independent is particularly keen on the AV referendum, and together with the Telegraph, is the source with the most political party-related news stories.
4) The Telegraph was the source that posted the most stories about Barack Obama and the Royal Wedding* .
5) Of the sources analysed, The Financial Times is the only one that provides significant coverage of China, focusses heavily on US news and has consistently reported on inflation.
6) Channel 4 News and BBC News follow similar news agendas. The BBC has been particularly paying attention to job losses and prices.
7) The Guardian is more interested than others in phone hacking, and together with The Independent is the source that has most reported on cuts.
8) Sky News has plenty of sources, and consistently reports on ministerial statements.
9) While both appear further down the lists, it’s surprising to see the Oscars in the top-spots, while not finding the Liberal Democrats or EU-related stories among the top-20 trends of any of the analysed sources.
10) Compared to a previous analysis (of the Coalition Government’s first 100 days in office http://tweetminster.co.uk/100days), several trends remain central to the UK’s media coverage, including David Cameron, banks, the Big Society and cuts, while other topics have dropped out of the media limelight - the most notable example being the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
*(not as part of the same stories)
You can view a hi-res version of the infographic by clicking here.
As part of this exercise, we also analysed the most shared links by journalists during the month of February - these are the top-10:
1) Al Jazeera Livestream
2) BBC News Middle East & North Africa unrest liveblog
3) Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere - Paul Mason
4) “Save our NHS!” petition
5) Guardian’s Moscow correspondent expelled from Russia - The Guardian
6) Reuters Egypt liveblog
7) Tory backers pay party £2,000 to buy their children work experience
- Mail Online
8) Eddie Mair putting Francis Maude on the spot: “what volunteering do
you do?” - Audioboo
9) FactCheck: Is Cameron sure about that Sure Start budget? - The
FactCheck Blog
10) How we will release the grip of state control - The Telegraph
During #Budget11 we processed 31,831 tweets. The average rate of posts was 3.29 tweets per second.
The most tweeted parts of the budget were the announcement of a 1p per litre fuel duty cut, which peaked at 9.5 tweets per second, followed by corporation tax announcements at 8.8 tweets per second, while the announcement of 21 enterprise zones registered 7.5 tweets per second and the revised OBR growth figures (2011 growth revised down to 1.7%) saw 5.57 tweets per second.
Other parts of the budget that registered a higher than average frequency of tweets include mentions of inflation, pensions, inheritance tax (reduction for leaving 10% of estate to charity), green investment bank, tax allowance (up £630 to £8105), bank levy and changes to the tax system.
Sentiment around the budget was fundamentally unchanged - started at 2.9, ended at 3.0 (on a scale of 1-5, where 5 is most positive).
Ed Miliband’s response to the budget peaked at 5.1 tweets per second around the term iPod.
