Well, the Queensland state election is about to start in earnest: Premier Anna Bligh is expected to visit the Governor tomorrow to ask her to resolve parliament and call an election for the end of March. As we’re approaching that time, I’ve been starting to get a few media enquiries about the role social media are likely to play in the election – and we’re tracking developments for our international elections research project, too.
In preparation, I’ve started to have a look at the activities of some of Queensland’s leading politicians (some 60 candidates are on Twitter so far, as far as I can tell – quite a healthy number), and I thought I’d share my initial observations here. So, let’s look in turn at the two major candidates for the Premiership, and their deputies:
Anna Bligh, Premier (Australian Labor Party) – 27,725 followers
For Bligh, it’s striking how much she’s responding directly to individual Twitter users – she’s taking a very conversational approach, trying to appear highly personable and responsive. And if we can trust the tweet signatures (messages by her staff are signed ‘Prem_Team’), she does most of this personally, while her staff post the more generic announcement messages. Bligh also has vastly more followers than the other leaders combined – mostly a result of her prominence in the Queensland floods, I would think.
Andrew Fraser, Deputy Premier (Australian Labor Party) – 2,215 followers
For Fraser, the vast majority of his tweets are questions for / criticisms of / attacks on the LNP opposition, often @mentioning LNP MPs (and others, such as the billionaire mining magnate and major LNP supporter Clive Palmer) in the process (perhaps to goad them into an aggressive reply). Fraser also frequently links to relevant media articles. This is interspersed with more upbeat updates from the campaign trail, and some (attempts at) humour.
Campbell Newman, Candidate for Premier (Liberal National Party) – 3,820 followers
Newman’s Twitter activities have been a bit erratic – no tweets at all between 4 Feb. and 12 Feb., for example, which seems very odd. Also, most of ‘his’ tweets seem to be posted by his staff (they’re signed CANDOTEAM, CANDO TEAM, or CANDOQLD TEAM – again, this seems somewhat inconsistent); a fair amount of them are responding to enquiries from everyday Twitter users, though. This account feels very PR in style – lots of links to press releases, few attempts at showcasing the candidate’s personality.
Jeff Seeney – technically the leader of the opposition (seeing as Newman isn’t currently an MP), but in practice Newman’s deputy – does not appear to have a Twitter account (there are a handful of fake accounts, though). Seeney’s parliamentary deputy is, however:
Tim Nicholls, Deputy Leader of the Opposition (Liberal National Party) – 866 followers
Nicholls has posted three tweets since Thursday, and then there’s a ten-day gap back to 6 Feb. Most of his posts are negative towards the government, though for the most part not @mentioning Bligh, Fraser, or anyone else directly, or linking to further information; overall, his tweets sound like the soundbites he would give to the media, or like heckles from the opposition benches. It don’t think he or his staff quite get hashtags, either; only a few of them use #qldpol or #qldvotes; others are too generic to be of much use (“#time to vote”) or are broken (#nowwe’recooking).
So there you have it. Let’s stress the positive and say that there’s plenty of room for improvement here. I’ll try to check in again with these accounts later in the campaign, to see how they’ve developed in the meantime…