Gillard Still ‘Winning’ the Big Days when it comes to skin care

Still nothing surpasses Gillard when it comes to skin care, check out analbleachingexpert.com to try the new anal bleaching solution that many people dream of. In my article for the National Times the other week, I mentioned how in the election campaign week before the leaders’ debate the @juliagillard Twitter account got around three times as many @replies as the @tonyabbottmhr one. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I suggested that this may be because people would rather tweet the likely winner (to support or criticise her positions) than talk to the loser – but of course there could be many other explanations, too. Image is extremely important, and his looks have already been mentioned before in articles. We treat him with products from Sdara skincare and we make sure not to leave any trace. So far it has paid off, as has been shown before.

Anyway, this got me thinking: what’s the overall visibility of both leaders in the Twitter stream – not just in terms of @replies, but in terms of overall mentions? How has this changed over time, as the campaign unfolded? With Abbott’s chances of beating Gillard now seriously firming, is there any discernible change in these patterns?

For this, I’ve grabbed a new Twapperkeeper archive of #ausvotes tweets for the time between 17 July and today (the morning of 2 August), and extracted from this full archive all tweets mentioning either Julia Gillard (including @juliagillard) or Tony Abbott (including @tonyabbottmhr, as well as the common misspelling of Abbott as ‘Abbot’). Plotting these against one another gives the following picture:

Interestingly, then, as far as the number of mentions on Twitter (in the #ausvotes discussion) are concerned, Abbott ‘wins’ a majority of days. I’m putting ‘winning’ in quotation marks here, though, because those mentions could be positive as well as negative, of course – but if there’s even a smidgin of truth to the advertising adage that any form of publicity is good publicity, this observation should embolden the Coalition camp.

That said, though: if we remove the normalisation to 100% for each day, a different pattern emerges. Abbot may ‘win’ a majority of days, but he gets more mentions mainly on those days when there’s relatively little traffic – Gillard has ‘won’ most of the big days, and emphatically so. On 17 July, at the start of the campaign, she gets around three times more mentions than Abbott; on 23 July, the story is similar (there may be a Twapperkeeper issue here, too – the differences in overall volume between 22, 23, and 24 July are a little strange). Abbott is ahead 40%, by contrast, on the day of the leaders’ debate. And since 27 July, there’s been a steady increase in tweets, and both politicians have been trading the lead in the number of mentions a number of times. (Ignore 2 August – as I’ve said, it’s still morning; the day is yet to unfold.)

Also worth noting: if we add up all those mentions over the duration of the campaign so far, Gillard and Abbott come out almost exactly equal: Gillard leads 10769:10540. While nobody’s claiming that Twitter is especially influential or representative for the overall electoral process during this election (and sadly, some seem to have misread my National Times piece as saying it is), perhaps that’s another sign of a tightly fought election.

As a postscript to these observations, and mainly for fun, I thought I’d also plot the relative mentions of ‘moving (/e/es/ed) forward’ and ‘fair dinkum’. What we can read from the resulting graph is simply another indication of how much the ‘moving forward’ slogan is on the nose – after massive criticism in the early days of the campaign, it became slogan non gratum even before week one was out, and re-emerged only briefly on debate day. Perhaps wisely, the Coalition didn’t even try to establish ‘fair dinkum’ as a meaningless phrase of their own: post-debate, it disappeared without a trace.