5th
Scratching the surface of “socialness”
There have been quite a few articles and recent pieces of analysis looking into how MPs are using social media. We’ve provided thoughts on the role of Twitter to some and have been delighted to see the use of Tweetminster data in others. There have also been a couple of guesses at listing the “top” political tweeters.
We feel it would be valuable to bring to some of these initial observations a richer set of data, but more importantly insights into “socialness” by looking for example at MP-generated content and conversations.
There are now 27 MPs (and over 40 PPCs) on Twitter.
The average MP has 358 followers, follows 96 people and has posted 177 times to Twitter.
These are our first steps in this direction.
The following chart displays the most retweeted MPs (i.e. number of MP tweets that other people have shared)
Values indicate the number of MP posts that have been retweeted.
While this figure shows the potential conversations generated by an MP’s tweets (i.e. the number of MP tweets that have generated a reply)
Values indicate the number of replies to an MP’s tweets.
If we look at these values within the context of the number of posts we start to have a basic indication of “socialness”. For example if we look at the sum of replies and retweets balanced with the total number of posts the closeness of the result to one (i.e. 1.0) would indicate that a high number of tweets is likely to be evolving around a conversation.
We did some of the maths:
Tom Watson’s 1.05, Jo Swinson’s 0.88 and Kerry McCarthy’s 1.08 scores indicate very high levels of both conversations and engagement happening around their updates; Lynne Featherstone’s 0.63 and David Lammy’s 1.5 indicate high levels of engagement; Grant Shapps’ 0.3, Andy Reed’s 0.28 and Julia Goldsworthy’s 1.67 indicate high participation, but slightly lower levels of reach (i.e. their updates are less retweeted by others for example) while John Prescott’s 3.03 and Michael Fabricant’s 2.4 would indicate that they generate conversations, but aren’t necessarily participating within the interest resulting from their updates.
All the examples are of course from a selection of the most active and/or engaging MPs on Twitter. And this data alone doesn’t in any way intend to provide an exhaustive picture.
There is so much more to explore, drilldown and discover: this just scratches the surface. We look forward to further measuring, analysing and fostering the socialness and openness that Twitter can enable, and to sharing this potential very soon.
All the data used in this post was accurate as of March 1st 2009.
