Featur e The Long and
Tweet of It: What Role Did Twitter Play in the Election?
by Mark Blevis
suggesting it would be. While the label might have intend- ed to recognize this particular election was going to be the most digital Canadian election to date, it also seemed to imply Twitter would factor heavily in voter decisions. Twitter has indeed become a popular online communi- cation channel, although data show Canadian adoption of the tool prior to the election was light. An August 2010 re- port by comScore shows 13 per cent of Canadians (rough- ly four and a half million people) had Twitter accounts. It's fair to say fewer used their accounts with any regularity. By comparison, 17 million Canadians have Facebook ac- counts and a December 2010 report by eMarketer showed Canada ranked higher than the US and UK in viewing and sharing online video. Why the focus on Twitter? I suspect several reasons which can be rolled up into time and effort. Effective community building using a Facebook Fan Page can be demanding and there is a perception that producing meaningful videos requires a lot of skill. Worse yet, many people believe they must produce viral videos (don't trust anyone who claims they can create "viral"). Blogs are simi- larly dismissed for requiring too much effort.
W 16 Campaigns & Elections | Canadian Edition
hen our 41st federal general election was called, I proclaimed it would not be "The Twitter Election" many people were
This leaves Twitter; the low hang- ing fruit of digital media. All you need is an Internet connection, web browser, email
address and the creativity and moment it takes to articulate a thought in 140 characters. Twitter did figure prominently in the narrative of the election. Many political candidates adopted Twitter as a tool for their campaigns, and journalists have for quite some time been following tweets (Twitter messages) to identify potential stories. That was only part of the story, though.
One tweet every six seconds My research using Sysomos MAP found Twitter figured
prominently in the discourse from the day the writ was dropped. Canadians issued more than 35,000 election- related tweets during that first weekend. Comparatively, each of the three weekends prior to the election call com- bined for an average of 1,800 tweets about Canadian fed- eral politics. There was an average of 15,000 election-related tweets issued from Canadian twitter accounts each day of the campaign. That’s a lot of Twitter traffic, roughly one tweet every six seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for six weeks. No one can possibly follow that many tweets.
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