Social Media and Irish Politics go Hand-in-Hand
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Tue, Jul 20, 2010
Social Media in now growing among Irish Politicians. A few weeks ago a politician started to follow me on Twitter. What can social media tell us about the current state of Irish politics and people’s views? I choose the two main parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael to use as a straw poll.
Social Media’s first metric is the number of comments online about each party.
When compared against each other over the last 7 days Fine Gael has 67% of the mentions against Fianna Fail with only 33%.
The majority of Fine Gael’s comments came from the news forums at the beginning of the week focusing on the following keywords:
It is not surprising that for the political parties, online newspapers still provide the great percentage of mentions against any other social media channel. News accounts for around 55% ~ 60% of all mentions. Twitter accounts for only 20% of mentions. In summary Fine Gael is very good at ‘getting mentioned’ in the press. If we look further what can we establish?
Social Media’s next metric is to look at the sentiment of the mentions. Sentiment is calculated using an algorithm to look for positive or negative tone. If we compare the two parties together Fine Gael still has the under hand but with more positive mentions.
It is interesting that during the last 7 days the papers published that Fine Gael received a donation from a top NAMA developer which does not seem to have a majority effect on public sentiment... however, only yesterday the number of tweets increased for Fine Gale claiming that the honeymoon could be over:
In summary measuring online mentions provides us with a valuable insight into public opinion about your brand, company or products. For Fine Gael is appears that they are ahead of the curve.