Tweetminster Daily - February 18 2010

The Tweetminster Daily is a summary of the day’s top political stories and analysis around the main parties. The summary isn’t curated or editorially controlled, but entirely built using data.

Issue 26 - 18/02/2010 - 18:00

Conservatives

Volume of stories & conversations: 288

Most popular links in the last 24 hours:

1. Winterton attacks the oiks
2. Brent Conservatives deliver on Council Tax promise
3. Do You Have a Question for David Cameron?
4. Posters worth a thousand words
5. Biased BBC? Not really, no…

Party sentiment score: -2 (Variation in the past 24 hours: -2)
Leader sentiment score: +2 (Variation in the past 24 hours: -16)

Labour

Volume of stories & conversations: 135

Most popular links in the last 24 hours:

1. Gordon Brown’s cabinet meets in Durham city school
2. Labour to rebrand Lambeth as ‘John Lewis’ council
3. Labour uses Cabinet tour to rally party for election
4. Michael Howard and the mystery UFO: an elaborate Labour hoax?
5. Falklands are fully protected, insists Gordon Brown

Party sentiment score: -2 (24 hour variation: -4)
Leader sentiment score: 5 (24 hour variation: +13)

Liberal Democrats

Volume of stories & conversations: 33

Most popular links in the last 24 hours:

1. Nasty Lib Dems
2. Lib Dem branch suspended in rules probe
3. Ask Nick Clegg
4. I’ve never voted Lib Dem before but…
5. Lib Dem spike or not, it’s time to prepare for a post-majoritarian politics

Party sentiment score: 7 (24 hour variation: +7)
Leader sentiment score: 0 (24 hour variation: NC)

Posted at Thu, Feb 18th 2010, 18:15
permalink

Tweetminster Daily - February 17 2010

The Tweetminster Daily is a summary of the day’s top political stories and analysis around the main parties. The summary isn’t curated or editorially controlled, but entirely built using data.

Issue 25 - 17/02/2010 - 18:00

Conservatives

Volume of stories & conversations: 130

Most popular links in the last 24 hours:

1. Tory marriage policy based on ‘mostly rubbish’ research, says party official
2. Do you have a question for David Cameron?
3. David Wright, Twitter and taxpayer’s cash
4. Co-sign my letter to David Cameron
5. Tories’ gay views have changed, says Nick Herbert

Party sentiment score: 0 (Variation in the past 24 hours: +3)
Leader sentiment score: +18 (Variation in the past 24 hours: +8)

Labour

Volume of stories & conversations: 76

Most popular links in the last 24 hours:

1. Labour MP: ‘Scum’ Tweet Was Not Me
2. David Wright MP: Conservatives are ‘scum-sucking pigs who would ruin Britain’
3. Voters react to Brown interview: more sympathy, less respect
4. Labour candidate pledges to ‘get serious’ about diabetes
5. PM’s Porkies

Party sentiment score: 0 (24 hour variation: -2)
Leader sentiment score: -8 (24 hour variation: -21)

Liberal Democrats

Volume of stories & conversations: 13

Most popular links in the last 24 hours:

1. Lib Dem spike or not, it’s time to prepare for a post-majoritarian politics
2. Lib Dem branch suspended in rules probe
3. Nick Clegg shows his hand
4. Nick Clegg MP visits Ed Fordham in Kilburn

Party sentiment score: 0 (24 hour variation: +1)
Leader sentiment score: 0 (24 hour variation: NC)

Posted at Wed, Feb 17th 2010, 18:13
permalink

Tweetminster Daily - February 15 2010

The Tweetminster Daily is a summary of the day’s top political stories and analysis around the main parties. The summary isn’t curated or editorially controlled, but entirely built using data.

Issue 24 - 15/02/2010 - 18:00

Conservatives

Volume of stories & conversations: 361

Most popular links in the last 24 hours:

1. Guardian - Tories get their sums wrong in attack on teen pregnancy
2. BBC News - Tories criticised over teenage pregnancy figure error
3. BBC News - Goldie Hawn talks to Tories about setting up schools (BBC News - Goldie Hawn talks to Tories about setting up schools
4. The Conservatives’ new poster campaign leads to full-scale Twitter warfare
5. Conservatives parade converts to their cause

Party sentiment score: -1 (Variation in the past 24 hours: +1)
Leader sentiment score: +15 (Variation in the past 24 hours: +17)

Labour

Volume of stories & conversations: 146

Most popular links in the last 24 hours:

1. BBC News - Piers Morgan interview with Gordon Brown attracts 4.2m
2. Guardian - The celebrity debasement of politics
3. Guardian - We do feel sorry for Gordon Brown, but in the wrong way
4. New Statesman - Why the Tories’ pregnancy error is alarming
5. Labour List - More very dodgy Tory stats as they say 54% of under 18s likely to fall pregnant in most deprived areas

Party sentiment score: -9 (24 hour variation: -9)
Leader sentiment score: +13 (24 hour variation: NC)

Liberal Democrats

Volume of stories & conversations: 49

Most popular links in the last 24 hours:

1. Guardian - Lib Dems rule out coalition government
   
2. Guardian - Tories leave cross-party talks on care for elderly in doubt
3. Guardian - Lib Dems in the spotlight as potential for hung parliament looms
4. BBC News - Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg ‘undecided about coalitions’
5. Sky News - No Coalition Deal Says Lib Dem Leader Clegg

Party sentiment score: +18 (24 hour variation: +5)
Leader sentiment score: 0 (24 hour variation: NC)

New MPs/PPCs on Twitter:

@elliotfullwood - Independent PPC for Chelsea and Fulham

Posted at Mon, Feb 15th 2010, 18:28
permalink

Which is the most talked about party on Twitter?

Each day Tweetminster tracks the volume of news stories and conversations around the three main parties on Twitter.

This metric tells us several things:

1. how many stories there are about the parties in the media each day
2. how widely these stories are being shared and discussed
3. the frequency with which people are talking about these stories, and the diversity of conversations and opinions that are being shared.

We thought it would be interesting to plot the volume of stories and conversations around the three main parties over a period of time.

The following graph does just that and shows volume of stories and conversations for the past 9 working days (i.e. February 1st to February 11th, weekends excluded):

The graph clearly shows a consistently greater volume of conversations and stories around the Conservative party. The trend is further highlighted by looking at totals and averages per party:

• The Conservatives averaged 218.4 stories and conversations per day, totalling 1966.
• Labour averaged 179.6 per day and totalled 1617.
• The Liberal Democrats average 47.2 per day and totalled 425 stories and conversations.

Simply put, this means a combination of: a) more news stories about the Conservatives are being shared b) there are more conversations about the Conservatives than there are around the other main parties.

Tweetminster also tracks the most shared and mentioned links/URLs around the main parties, which are helpful in understanding the trends behind the volume. For the purpose of this analysis we categorised links in to simple categories:

• official party communications
• news pertinent to one of the main parties
• stories, conversations and analysis around official announcements
• stories & conversations that scrutinise or criticise (i.e. are negative towards) official communications

We found that:

• the most frequently shared links and conversations tend to be around the Conservative Party.
• these include: official communications from the Conservative Party, stories and conversations, both negative and positive, around these announcements and news stories pertinent to the party. In all these groupings, the volume around the Conservative party is greater than around both Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
• the majority of “labour-related” stories and conversations tend to be around “neutral” Government-related news and conversations around these stories, both positive and negative.
• there is likely to be a combination of both scrutiny and “negativity” at play. Either way, it would seem that negative stories tend to be more widely shared than positive ones.
• stories and conversations around the Liberal Democrats rarely go beyond the “party network”
• the mainstream media’s focus is mainly split between the Government and the Conservative Party.

We look forward to your thoughts.

Posted at Fri, Feb 12th 2010, 15:17
permalink