The Wardman Wire

This data has been published by Tweetminster, based on the number of people following the feeds of MPs, Prospective Parliamentary Candidates and official Party Feeds.

These are the sums of MPs, PPCs, and all party feed followers, so overlaps such as me following a lot of MPs have not been removed.

Party – Followers

Labour: 32020
Lib Dem: 11668
Conservative: 13938
Other: 6924

My comment

I put the extra followers for The Labour Party and Labour Parliamentarians down to them being quicker off the mark with the rapid growth of Twitter in late 2009/early 2009 than the Tories, as a result of the deliberate “Web 2.0″ strategy introduced from the summer of 2008.

The overall numbers are still tiny, but a number of MPs are usefully interacting with their constituents, party members, and online commentators.

Misinterpretations Already

There are already, less than 3 hours later, a few people getting the wrong end of the stick with this data.

This was what Tweetminster said:

“We thought it would be interesting to try and measure the reach of each party on Twitter, and had a first go at this by simply looking at the number of followers for Members of Parliament, Prospective Parliamentary Candidates and official party feeds.”

E-Politix tweeted:

“[Fascinating - Labour dominates the twittersphere]“

Err. No. They didn’t take account of independent party-aligned Tweeters. This data is MPs and PPCs only, and does not let you make that statement. “Labour MPs and PPCs have more total followers than the other parties combined” – maybe. The overall number of “political followers” is tiny.

E-Politix are a professional political news site and should know better; most of their output does not make that type of mistake.

Claire Hazelgrove (Lab PPC for Skipton and Ripon, and a 3rd year Politics student) tweeted:

“@tweetminster reports that Labour have more than double the number of MPs & PPCs on Twitter than the Tories do – http://bit.ly/IGXhH“

Not from this evidence. They report the “number of followers for MPs”, not the number of MPs themselves. Labour *has* got more MPs twittering (I think) but there’s no data here to show it.

[Update: Tweetminster have confirmed that my guess was correct: there are more Labour MPs on Twitter.]

@nickydavis and @danielcouzens keep it simple:

“Twitter reach of UK political parties (via @tweetminster): http://bit.ly/IGXhH

Study of Individual MPs on Twitter next week

On Monday I’ll be taking an overall look at the Parliamentary users of Twitter. A few tasters:

There are around 55 MPs listed with Twitter accounts.

Of these, perhaps 25-30% are very regular users, and a similar number have tried it and given up. The others are on a spectrum of use in between.

Tweetminster have validated all accounts and 90% of Twittering MPs run their accounts personally.