The Independent today asks “Could the next election finally provide a reason for the [Twitter] microblogging service?”
There are many reasons for Twitter, some better than others, but if today’s Independent article is anything to go by, the General Election won’t be one of them.
“It’s Twitter that will make this election unique.”, the Indy proclaims, before going on to show why that claim is almost certainly not true.
The paper lists the political twitterati, a mixture – it turns out – of established figures doing a bit of tweeting and political bloggers.
Most excitingly for us at Lib Dem Voice, our very own Mark Pack snuggles between Vince Cable and Lynne Featherstone as one of three “Liberals” (I could have sworn the party changed its name a couple of decades ago) on the list.
Likewise for the other parties, names familiar to the blogging fraternity but unknown to the wider millions of voters (Iain Dale, Tim Montgomerie, Tory Bear, Ellie Gellard) snuggle up with a handful of better known political figures (Alastair Campbell, John Prescott).
But look at the number of followers.
Amongst those tweeting from a political party standpoint, the number of followers of these microblogging kings and queens stretches from around 12,000 at the top (Campbell, Prescott) down to between one and two thousand (still a great deal more followers than I’ve got, by the way).
Iain Dale, one of the two top bloggers in the country, has 7,299 followers.
Now reflect on how you win General Elections. You focus on the floating voters in your marginal constituencies.
None of the political twitterers has more followers than there are residents in a single metropolitan borough ward, never mind parliamentary constituency.
How many votes can Iain Dale seriously swing in key Tory target seats? A handful at best.
In contrast, targeted mail, leaflets, posters and mainstream media coverage reaches millions of people across the country and, the case of the first three, can be directed to those areas where they’re most needed.
Does Twitter enable those Twitterers to get positive attention they would otherwise not have managed, that leads onto vote-winning media coverage? Rarely.
Twitter may be an excellent way for reaching friends, colleagues, supporters and followers. It may well be a useful communication tool in some circumstances.
But a General Election game changer? Not this year.
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10 Comments
Twitter may be an excellent way for reaching friends, colleagues, supporters and followers
Do you really think it even does that compared to FB? I’m still scratching my head as to its uses. It seems a gimmick that will look like flared trousers at the end of this decade.
Is there something to be said for reaching the media in London? Using Twitter journalists will perhaps be able to get a better idea of what is happening in the marginals, pick up on interesting election stories, and gauge popular sentiment? Is Twitter perhaps a better tool for influencing the influencers than influencing the masses?
I use twitter to get the news via twitter feeds and by following a few freelance journalists and bloggers. As a source of news and political gossip it is excellant but I don’t know how well it would work for speaking to voters. A politician could reach me through twitter if I already knew of and respected them. And I’m a bit of a news junky, so it seems to me that it is a terrible way of reaching ordinary, non-alligned voters. Certainly no one will be elected if all they do is tweet (unless the other candidates don’t campaign at all)
It’ll be a game changer when someone figures out how to use it to mobilise activists. I try to use it to communicate with constituents about various things, but don’t have enough followers to tip even a district council by-election.
@ Iain
Because they are not playing a good game. Simple. I’ve been to enough social media events etc and talk with people who have more than 100K followers.
The problem is and I apologise for sounding like a business drone but is that we yet do not understand social media, thus only seeing it as a fleeting marketing fad.
I follow Prescott et al and he doesn’t twit as much as he should to get more people to follow him but furthermore, it’s a job and a half to develop a successful social media campaign.
But alas people involved with politics are just so risk adverse and OBSESSED with ‘top down’ that I think subconsiously they don’t ‘put in any effort’ at all.
I mean why be innovative? When you can be safe and never, ever create change in your personal and proffessional life?
Heck. More of the same indeed. Sigh.
You say “How many votes can Iain Dale seriously swing in key Tory target seats? A handful at best.”
I dont use Twitter to sway votes. And even if I was a candidate or an MP I’d regard it as a tangetial activity at best.
@Iain Dale – true. I wasn’t criticising your use of Twitter, but the Indy’s suggestion that it would be important in the General Election.
To add my 2p: Twitter can be good for reaching activists, the media and other opinion formers; it’s also got a role in reaching a wider internal audience (e.g. for PPC to motivate helpers) and generally it’s not great for reaching voters directly, though there are some exceptions, e..g Lynne Featherstone’s use of Twitter to help gather in information about lack of gritting from constituents.
Twitter may well be a game changer, but the Independent misses the point. The power of twitter lies not in personalities tweeting but in the masses. We saw that with welovethenhs and the trafiguera debacle.
The crucial thing though is that while it may help or hinder a particular party, it is hard to see how any particular party can manipulate it without the thing backfiring spectacularly. Thus, it is more of a hazard than a tool. Look at Kerry McCarthy’s experience. The only thing Labour’s so-called twitter tsar has achieved has been to make herself into a target.
That isn’t to say that it should be ignored. It is useful for sharing information and can be great fun. But in terms of pushing propaganda – unless we are prepared to go to the sort of dishonest lengths that totalitarian regimes such as Iran and China indulge in – it is worse than most.
Reading this a few years on, and it is remarkable how things have changed – to the extent that we now have a US President who seems to be using Twitter as his prime, unfiltered public communication channel.
On a more positive note, Twitter is now an essential *part* of the whole communications mix and we write it off at our peril. At the very least, for activists it can be a very effective way of engaging directly with others at all levels – people who it would simply not be possible to make contact with via more conventional means.