Member News
By Ned Simons - 25th January 2010
Labour Party members are far more active and influential users of Twitter than their political rivals, according to a report published this afternoon.
Research conducted by Tweetminster shows that Labour MPs and parliamentary candidates are "more active, more frequently mentioned, and have more followers than the other two parties combined".
According to the report there are 65 Labour MPs on Twitter compared to just 16 Conservatives.
But 23 Liberal Democrat MPs use the site, just over a third of their entire parliamentary party.
The top five most mentioned MPs on the site are all Labour politicians, with the party's 'Twitter tsar' Kerry McCarthy far out in front with 14,921 mentions.
Although given that an online campaign to unseat her at the next election has been launched by some Conservative bloggers, not all of those mentions may be complementary. She was also the 'victim' of a joke by comedian Ross Noble, who asked his thousands of followers to send her humorous questions.
Labour MPs, PPCs and party accounts had 113,201 people and organisation following them, compared to 36,874 following Conservative tweeters and 32,202 following Liberal Democrats.
The left-wing presence on Twitter is in sharp contrast to the blogosphere, which, despite some recent developments, many the right seems to dominate with popular websites such as ConservativeHome, Ian Dale's Diary, and the Guido Fawkes blog.
And the report shows that Labour's grassroots are more active than the Conservative base, while the Tory high command is much more effective at using Twitter to distribute the party's official line.
It indicates that the battle-lines on Twitter at the next election will be between Labour activists and the Conservative Party machine, perhaps an indication of the left settling into a position of de-centralised opposition in advance of an expected Tory government.
The report also concludes that the participation of senior party members has a crucial role to play in expanding the reach of the party's message.
It notes that the tweets of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg and Conservattive chairman Eric Pickles stand out well above their party's average statistics.
But at his monthly press conference this morning David Cameron told journalists that he would not personally use the social-networking site.
He said it might not be wise for him to commit to a form of communication which did not allow him to carefully consider what he said.
Cameron has been burned by Twitter previously, famously having to apologise after using bad language when explaining why he did not use the site.
"Politicians do have to think about what we say... Too many twits might make a twat," he said on live radio.
The report analysed some 831,349 tweets made between January 1, 2009 and January 15, 2010.
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