By the numbers: pollie want to Twitter?
The pollies' spin doctors have embraced social media as a way to win approval. Surely, then, if it's just a popularity contest, Christine Milne is lost in the wilderness, Tony Abbott is out at sea — and maybe Miranda Kerr should be prime minister.
Twitter, with its content freely available and open to analysis, has enabled a range of clout and reach metrics that PR people have only been able to dream about.
Yet, the man who is most likely to lead the country at the next election doesn't really stack up in the tweetosphere. With just 57,850 followers, Tony Abbott has a quarter of the fan base of the PM, and only 5 per cent of @KRuddMP's numbers.
(Credit: Phil Dobbie/ZDNet Australia)
In his defence, though, Abbott isn't trying as hard as the rest. Anyone can get heaps of followers by targeting the accounts of those who will reciprocate by following you if you follow them. So, a better measure of your tweet appeal has to be the ratio between how many people you follow and how many follow you.
On that basis, Julia Gillard is trying hard to win our twitter vote. She has 1.3 followers for every person she follows, compared to 4.4 for Tony Abbott. But Abbott needs to take a peek over his shoulder — Malcolm Turnbull's ratio is 12.4. The departing Bob Brown managed 8.4 followers for each name on his list. His successor Christine Milne is up there with Malcolm Turnbull, but with fewer than 5000 followers in total, she still has a lot of work to do.
Another measure of influence is how often you say something that people want to pass on or retweet. I thought my retweets were few and far between, but, according to retweetrank.com, I'm doing a better job than any of our top politicians. Sadly for our prime minister, she gets about as much traction here as Bob Brown.
(Credit: Phil Dobbie/ZDNet Australia)
So, what can we tell from all of this? The main conclusion in my mind is that you can over-analyse tweets. If we didn't know any better, we'd assume that Kevin Rudd is immensely popular and Bob Brown is way down the list, about as popular as Julia Gillard. Actually, perhaps that's not far off the mark.