Mapping Online Publics

The 2013 Australian federal election campaign is (finally) over – and as the final vote counts in tightly contested seats conclude, the incoming Abbott government will presumably be sworn into office any week now, after a surprisingly low-key start to the post-election period. Time, then, to explore how the final week of the campaign unfolded on Twitter, and indeed to look back over the entire campaign period to chart the parties’ and candidates’ uses of Twitter and the response from the Twitter audience. This first overview will also form the basis for further, more detailed research which we’ll publish in the months to come of course, and for comparative analyses of the Australian (7 Sep.), Norwegian (9 Sep.) and German (22 Sep.) social media election campaigns in partnership with our overseas colleagues.

First, the obligatory reminder about what we’re examining here: we are tracking all tweets by and @mentions of sitting members and candidates in the 2013 federal election. As more (especially minor party) candidates have become known, we’ve progressively extended our list as far as possible. My previous posts with week-by week analyses of the Twitter activity patterns are also available here (week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4), and there are a few more posts on the networks of @mention and retweet interaction and two posts on the electorate-by-electorate distribution of Twitter activity.

Let’s begin this week’s analysis with another look at the @mentions directed at the key political leaders, now covering the entire campaign from the official declaration of the election on Sunday 4 Aug. to the Sunday following the election day on 7 Sep. As in previous weeks, a clear two-class system is evident: the two candidates for the Prime Ministership, incumbent Kevin Rudd and (successful) challenger Tony Abbott, are well ahead of their various party colleagues and the minor party leaders. Rudd, in turn, is well ahead of Abbott in the total number of @mentions he received over the course of the election campaign, although it should be noted that after the first week of the campaign the two leaders tracked one another very closely, and Abbott even pulled ahead of Rudd in week-by-week mentions for a while in mid-August. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, as it became clear that he would be the next Prime Minister of Australia Abbott also received significantly more mentions than Rudd on the election weekend itself. (As always, click the graphs to see a larger version.)

It’s tempting to read more into these figures, but we simply don’t yet have the comparative evidence that would support such interpretations. For example, Abbott’s @mentions increased especially strongly in mid-campaign as he was fending off some criticism for a number of controversial and ill-advised statements, so we might speculate that on balance, a greater volume of @mentions is actually an indication of voter disenchantment rather than  support; Rudd pulled ahead again in @mentions during the final week of the campaign just as his standing in the polls dropped. More detailed semantic analysis of @mentions will be required at a later date to examine the overall tenor of these tweets (and with automated sentiment detection still very, very unreliable, this will mainly need to be manual), so it’s impossible to make any firm claims about this at this stage.

The increase in @mentions of Abbott’s account during the election weekend, at any rate, is related to his success in the election, of course, as Twitter users are coming to terms with the change of government, congratulate the winner or warn him not to abuse his mandate, and tweet at Abbott to call for action on a broad range of policy issues. Interestingly, at the same time former PM Julia Gillard’s @mentions also increase notably again: this is almost entirely due to the fact that she broke her campaign-long Twitter silence on election night and tweeted her commiserations to the Labor election team, resulting in a substantial number of retweets and @replies.

The day-to-day figures show some of these trends in some more detail. We see Rudd and Abbott track each other quite closely for most of the campaign, with synchronised spikes in the @mentions of both leaders especially on the days of the three televised debates. Rudd receives a strong boost in numbers (if not necessarily in electoral support) in the days following the Labor campaign “launch” on 1 September (and Deputy PM Anthony Albanese also spikes briefly as he plays a leading role during the event), but it’s Abbott who wins the election weekend and to whom the focus shifts especially dramatically on the post-election Sunday. Minor party leader Clive Palmer also receives substantial @mentions on election day as reports emerge of his likely win in his own electorate of Fisher.

Interestingly, though, while PM-elect Abbott is the clear frontrunner in @mentions during the election weekend, his party’s other candidates don’t fare anywhere near as well. In the following graph, we’ve added up @mentions of all party candidates except for Abbott and Rudd (who are clearly in a league of their own), and it becomes evident that Labor candidates are mentioned significantly more often than their Liberal counterparts during the campaign as a whole, and even more frequently on the election weekend itself.

Again, it is all too tempting – but, in the absence of content and sentiment analyses, premature – to read too much into this. Possibly, Twitter users are simply lining up to say “good riddance” to a range of MPs who’ve just lost their seats – but just as possibly, they’re commiserating with them, thanking them for the past six years of government, or expressing their views about how the Labor Party should reposition itself for the future as it seeks to regain government in coming elections.

For the moment, my reading of the dramatic boost in @mentions for Labor politicians during the election weekend (and especially also on the post-election Sunday) tends towards the positive rather than negative: my sense is that it shows that, while they’ve removed it from government, voters (or at least those voters who are active on Twitter) haven’t completely tuned out the ALP, but are in fact very actively tweeting at its politicians to influence the party’s future direction. But that’s no more than an inkling for now – future research will need to explore this in more detail.

But let’s shift our attention from the activities of rank-and-file Twitter users to those of politicians themselves. It’s worth repeating an observation we’ve made throughout the campaign: for the most part, the volume of @mentions of the political leaders has very little to do with how much those leaders themselves have tweeted. If it did, we should expect to see Greens leader Christine Milne well ahead of everyone else, since she (assisted by her campaign team, presumably) has been the most active of all major politicians throughout the campaign. Another minor party leader, Clive Palmer, is also well represented here: encouraged perhaps by the social media response to some of his more notorious campaign stunts, his Twitter activity took off from about mid-campaign onwards.

More generally, it is notable that (where they did tweet at all) the major party frontbenchers have tended to be rather more active on Twitter than their leaders: Albanese, Turnbull, Bishop, and Wong have tweeted considerably more than Rudd or Abbott, and a number of them have also shown an upward trajectory in activity over the last week or so of the campaign. Bishop was especially active on election day itself, while it’s again all too tempting to suggest that Albanese’s increased activity might also be a first step in his tilt at the leadership of a post-Rudd ALP.

Rudd’s and Abbott’s far more restrained activity, by contrast, looks to me to be part of a deliberate attempt to be active throughout the campaign, but not to be so active as to overwhelm their followers with constant tweets (as Milne’s high-volume tweeting may have done to her less committed followers, for example). By comparison, though, my sense is that the apparently so social media-savvy Rudd and his team might have underdone it a little – especially as the underdog in the campaign, I would have thought he’d use Twitter and other social media more forcefully (and that also means more frequently) to argue his case for re-election. Perhaps his greater volume of tweets during the second half of the campaign is an acknowledgment of this shortcoming, in fact – it’s as if in late August they suddenly discovered that they needed to do more on Twitter.

But yet again, the leaders’ activity provides only a very incomplete picture of the total volume of tweets originating from the various parties’ candidates. In aggregate, Labor politicians tweeted significantly more than their counterparts in any other party, even if their leader’s social media activities remained surprisingly restrained: ALP candidates tweeted even more than their colleagues from the Greens (though it should be acknowledged that, representing a minor party, the total number of tweeting Greens candidates was also smaller).

This reflects the greater need for Labor to utilise social as well as all other forms of media to get its electoral message across, compared to its major rivals in the Coalition parties, and ties in well with perceptions of a “small target” campaign pursued by the Coalition: better to keep Coalition candidates from engaging with social media than to risk any negative repercussions from potential gaffes (indeed, at least for less experienced Coalition candidates this strategy appears to have extended to mainstream media engagements as well).

Overall, then (and excluding its leader’s own Twitter activity), Labor’s approach to social media seems to have resembled that of a minor party seeking any kind of media exposure more than that of a major party using social media merely as an add-on to mainstream media coverage – like the Greens, the Pirates and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party (with the latter two running considerably fewer tweeting candidates, however), Labor appears to have encouraged its candidates to tweet, and tweet a lot.

As we now know, this didn’t change the eventual outcome of the election, of course (and neither should we expect any one medium to do so in the contemporary, multi-channel media landscape, barring any especially major gaffe). Whether local Labor candidates’ social media performance helped to limit the losses by highlighting local contests over the Rudd/Abbott battle for the Prime Ministership, though, that’s a very different question – and one which will require a great deal of further analysis beyond the Twitter data themselves.

For my last post about the Twitter activity around Australian politicians before tomorrow’s election, I’m once again looking at the distribution of Twitter activity across Australia’s 150 electorates (this is excluding Senate candidates by default, therefore). We’ve done this once before during this campaign, a few weeks back – this post covers the period from 4 August to 1 September (i.e. the full campaign except for the final week, which hasn’t finished yet).

Once again, a reminder about our approach here: we are tracking all tweets by and @mentions of sitting members and candidates in the 2013 federal election. As more (especially minor party) candidates have become known, we’ve progressively extended our list as far as possible.

This post covers the two sides of the equation: first, I’ll provide an overview of which local candidates are receiving especially much attention on Twitter; further down, I’ll explore which candidates are particularly active in their own use of Twitter.

@mentions of Candidates

We’ll begin with the @mentions of local candidates. Just to make this absolutely clear: those @mentions may be coming from anywhere in Australia, and even in the world, not just from the electorate itself. So, if an electorate flares up in red in the maps below, it’s because its local candidate or candidates are @mentioned especially frequently on Twitter – not (necessarily) because Twitter users who are based in the electorate are highly active. (And as always, zoom in to enlarge.)

The national map points to some of the rural and regional electorates whose candidates have been especially frequently @mentioned on Twitter. In northert Queensland, Bob Katter’s seat of Kennedy gets considerable attention; in northern NSW, retiring Independent Tony Windsor remains a point of focus in New England; and in northeastern Victoria, Sophie Mirabella’s struggles to hang on to Indi have been a focal point for some time.

In and around Brisbane, Kevin Rudd’s seat of Griffith is featured strongly for obvious reasons. High profile draftee Peter Beattie lights up Forde, while former Treasurer Wayne Swan may be in trouble in Lilley. On the Sunshine Coast, neighbouring electorates Fairfax (where United Australia Party leader Clive Palmer is running) and Fisher (where the bitter feud between former Speaker Peter Slipper and LNP candidate Mal Brough continues) are also highly active.

In Sydney, Tony Abbott’s Warringah, Malcolm Turnbull’s Wentworth, and Joe Hockey’s North Sydney are featured even more prominently than Anthony Albanese’s Grayndler, Tanya Plibersek’s Sydney, Scott Morrison’s Cook, Chris Bowen’s McMahon, David Bradbury’s Lindsay, or Tony Burke’s Watson. Here, the high level of activity serves in the first place as a reminder of how much the frontbenches of both sides of politics are populated by politicians from a single city.

By comparison, Melbourne gets a much smaller share of the action. Sole Greens MP Adam Bandt’s seat of Melbourne leads the way, followed by Lalor (where retiring member and former PM Julia Gillard still receives her fair share of @mentions, even though she has been virtually absent from the campaign itself), and Bill Shorten’s Maribyrnong isn’t far behind. Flinders (where opposition climate spokesman Greg Hunt is standing) is somewhat less active, while Corangamite may be prominent mainly for the disendorsement of its Palmer’s United Australia Party candidate Buddy Rojek. Up in the northeast, rural Indi (at close to 6,000 tweets) leaves many a suburban seat behind.

In Adelaide, things are quieter still. Only Kate Ellis in the seat of Adelaide, and Mark Butler in Port Adelaide, have generate any real activity over the course of the campaign to date.

Meanwhile, the obvious star candidate in Perth – and perhaps the only Western Australian politician on Twitter who has a truly national profile – is Coalition foreign policy spokeswoman Julie Bishop.

In Tasmania, it looks like Twitter activity also reflects population density – and here, too, the only politician with a national profile, Independent Andrew Wilkie, is the main reason that Denison (taking in Hobart) is the state’s most prominent electorate.

The ACT is surrounded by interesting electorates – Indi, and the “bellwether” seat Eden-Monaro – but itself remains more subdued. Canberra itself is quiet, while Fraser (with its coastal exclave Jervis Bay), where Andrew Leigh is standing, is slightly more prominent.

And finally, nothing much to see in either of the two federal electorates covering the Northern Territory.

Tweets by Candidates

As we’ve seen in previous analyses, the volume of @mentions received by the candidates usually doesn’t correlate much at all with their own tweeting efforts; this is the case especially for the most prominent leaders, who’ll be @mentioned at significant volume even if they don’t tweet at all. So, it’s worth examining which local candidates have actively taken to Twitter across the nation.

The national map of tweeting candidates shows a few new hotspots. In Queensland, the highly active @MaranoaGreens account of Grant Newson lights up the southwest Queensland electorate of Maranoa, and his party colleague Jonathon Dykyj is similarly active in Dawson, half-way up the Queensland coast. Eden-Monaro and Indi again appear prominently in NSW and Victoria, while Tony Windsor’s would-be successors in New England (in northeastern NSW) haven’t generated a great deal of activity of their own. Corangamite southwest of Melbourne also flares up, due to the high volume of tweets from ex-Palmer candidate Buddy Rojek.

In Queensland, Kevin Rudd in Griffith and Wayne Swan in Lilley aren’t actually especially active, despite their high profiles. They’re outdone by their party colleagues Gayle Hislop in McPherson and Graham Perrett in Moreton (where the LNP’s Malcolm Cole and the Greens’ Elissa Jenkins are also fairly active). To the west, by the way, we see the eastern edge of Maranoa, which stretches from here to the state border.

In Sydney, the difference between the @mentions and tweets maps is even starker. Coalition and Labor leaders are active on Twitter, but not all that much; in Wentworth and Grayndler, sitting members Malcolm Turnbull and Anthony Albanese are also facing Twitter competition from Labor’s Di Smith and the Greens’ Hall Greenland, respectively. Further out west, Lindsay Labor MP David Bradbury is well outdone on Twitter by Palmer candidate Andrew Wilcox.

In Melbourne, by comparison, the inner city shows some more signs of life – perhaps precisely because the local candidates don’t also hold prominent frontbench positions. Greens MP Adam Bandt is being outdone by Labor’s Cath Bowtell in the set of Melbourne, while significant local Twitter battles also rage in Batman, Scullin, Gellibrand, and Calwell, to name but a few. In Corangamite, as I’ve noted before, disendorsed Palmer candidate Buddy Rojek is tweeting up a storm in spite of his newly found status as an Independent.

There’s less to say about Adelaide. Here, the sitting members in the outer electorates of Wakefield and Mayo – Labor’s Nick Champion and the Liberals’ Jamie Briggs, respectively – generate only some limited action, more or less unopposed.

In Perth, Julie Bishop isn’t only the recipient of a substantial number of @mentions, but also tweets out relatively frequently. She’s outdone, however, by the Greens’ Dawn Jecks in the southern electorate of Brand, who claims the crown as Western Australia’s most active tweeting candidate.

In Tasmania, tweets sent mirrors @mentions received remarkably closely. Once again, Andrew Wilkie’s Hobart-area seat of Denison leads the way, but Twitter by candidates in the seat is fairly evenly split between Palmer candidate Debra Thurley, Wilkie himself, the ALP’s Jane Austin, and the Greens’ Anna Reyno. Liberal candidate Tanya Denison’s fabulously-named @Denison4Denison account has not tweeted since 17 July.

The same goes for the ACT – as with the @mentions, we see limited activity from Canberra candidates Gai Brodtmann (Labor) and Julie Melrose (Greens), while in Fraser, active Twitter user Andrew Leigh (Labor) is some way ahead of the Greens’ Adam Verwey. Other parties’ candidates don’t seem to figure much here. Next door in Eden-Monaro, by the way, Labor’s Mike Kelly has taken to Twitter with some aplomb, while Palmer candidate Dean Lynch also puts in a strong showing.

Finally, Northern Territory candidates have s far failed to set Twitter alight. Perhaps there’s a chicken-and-egg situation here: seeing as they receive very few mentions, they may see little reason to tweet themselves; on the other hand, since they don’t tweet much, they don’t receive many @mentions. At any rate, it’s very quiet in the Top End.

We’re on the home stretch: Australia goes to the polls this Saturday (though quite a few Australians appear to have cast their votes early already). Here’s a final pre-election update on how the election has unfolded on Twitter from the 4 August campaign start through to last Sunday, then – with another look at the activity per electorate to follow tomorrow, if all goes well, and there will be a final round-up in the coming week. My earlier posts are here: week 1, a network of interactions, week 2, week3, and a per-electorate update.

A reminder about what we’re examining here: we are tracking all tweets by and @mentions of sitting members and candidates in the 2013 federal election. As more (especially minor party) candidates have become known, we’ve progressively extended our list as far as possible. In particular, this week a few more Pirate Party, WikiLeaks, and Palmer’s United Australia Party members make their entry into the mix.

We begin as usual with the overall volume of @mentions of the most prominent candidates. This week, Julie Bishop and Bill Shorten appear again in the top ten, due to a greater level of activity around their Twitter accounts in the past few weeks; at the top, though, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott continue to operate in a league of their own.

While Rudd continues to carry a substantial lead in his total number of @mentions from the first week of the campaign, the past three weeks have been a considerably tighter affair. From mid-August onwards, we’ve seen Abbott pick up a larger number of @mentions than Rudd, due to some controversial remarks on the campaign trail; more recently, however, Rudd has caught up with Abbott again (partly due to some controversy of his own), and has now opened up an @mentions lead over Abbott once again. This is aided in part by the Labor Party’s campaign “launch” on 1 September, which saw an especially strong increase in @mentions for Rudd. Also new in this top group is Clive Palmer, leader of the United Australia Party, whose colourful campaign in recent weeks has attracted increased Twitter attention.

The boost for Rudd over the final days of last week is especially notable from the day-to-day figures – unsurprisingly, both he and Deputy PM Albanese receive unusually many @mentions during the Labor campaign “launch”. Both Rudd’s and Abbott’s @mentions also spike during the final leaders’ debate on Wednesday 28 August.

As we’ve seen throughout the campaign, however, these @mentions of the political leaders have very little to do with the leaders’ own Twitter activities. If we took their own tweeting efforts as a yardstick, Greens leader Christine Milne, Coalition communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull, and Deputy Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should be the most @mentioned Australian political leaders: each of the three has added a substantial number of tweets to their tally over the past week, with Milne’s Twitter campaign in particular shifting up another gear.

To find the most active Australian politicians on Twitter, however, we need to look yet further afield. As Milne’s performance already shows, some of the minor parties have worked especially hard to make up for the much more limited air time and column inches they receive in the mainstream media by taking to social media platforms to promote their agendas. Of the candidates we track, then, accounts like the Pirate Party’s NSW Senate hopeful Brendan Molloy (@piecritic), his Climate Sceptics Party colleague Bill Koutalianos (@NoDirectAction), and former Palmer’s United Australia Party candidate for Corangamite Buddy Rojek (@Buddy4Coranga) – whose Twitter profile still lists him as an Independent, strangely who was disendorsed by his party for promising an extravagant election night party – all out-tweet their more illustrious competitors. Another Pirate, Senate candidate Mel Thomas (@photogramel), and WikiLeaks candidate Kellie Tranter, also feature prominently. It’s not surprising that especially the particularly Web-affine parties (Pirates and WikiLeaks) should appear here, of course.

In terms of total activity by their candidates, these smaller parties which tend to focus mainly on the Senate and a handful of promising local electorates cannot compete with the nationwide campaign activities of the major parties, however. If we aggregate the total volume of tweets by candidates of the various parties, Labor and the Greens show substantially more activity than any of the other parties. This supports the perception that – even in spite of a closer electoral race between Rudd and Abbott than there would have been between Gillard and Abbott – the Coalition continues to run something of a ‘small target’ strategy in its Twitter activities: limited activity by its candidates except for the key frontbenchers, and limited engagement with the electorate through this medium. Conversely, Labor and the Greens may see Twitter as a more useful medium for reaching their supporters, assuming perhaps that the Australian Twittersphere skews slightly to the left – though frankly I’ve seen very little hard evidence for this claim to date. (Note that the graph below shows Liberals, Nationals, and LNP separately – but even in combination the three Coalition parties wouldn’t reach the tweeting levels of Greens or Labor.)

Again, the aggregate volume of tweets directed at the various parties’ candidates tells a very different story, however. In the graph below we have excluded leaders Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott from the count, in order to get a better sense of the extent to which Twitter users address any of the other political candidates at all – it shows a strong focus on Labor and Coalition candidates even though the latter aren’t especially active at tweeting themselves. It’s tempting to see Labor’s lead over the Coalition here as a result of Labor candidates’ greater levels of Twitter activity; however, the fact that Labor candidates represent the current government, and a party which is struggling in the polls and is therefore receiving substantial attention, provides an equally valid explanation.

Finally, a brief look at the state-by-state activity. First, an overview of which state’s politicians are most active in their own tweeting efforts seems to broadly follow the distribution of the Australian population across the states – naturally, the more populous states are home to a greater number of local electorates, and are therefore also blessed (ahem) with a greater number of politicians. As a result, we see significant Twitter activity by politicians especially in New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland.

But once again this does not translate in a similar distribution of attention from the Twitter userbase. For the graph below we’ve once again removed the major @mention magnets Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott, in order to highlight Twitter activity around the other candidates – and doing so has brought New South Wales right to the fore. This reflects the fact that many of both major parties’ frontbenchers represent NSW electorates, and perhaps also supports the suggestion that a substantial part of the election is being fought in Western Sydney; additionally, it’s probably quite simply also a sign that Sydneysiders – representing Australia’s largest population centre – are especially well-represented on Twitter.

And that’s it for the moment. We’ll follow up again with an electorate-by-electorate breakdown of activity tomorrow – other than that, happy (?) voting!

Well. Another week of the Australian federal election campaign has just, um, flown by – time, then, to take another look at how things played out on Twitter. I’ve taken slightly different approaches for my various updates so far, and this week we’ll look at yet another aspect of the social media campaign: the different parties’ attempts to encourage their supporters to retweet their messages.

But first, another look at the headline figures – and just as a reminder, as I’ve explained in the previous posts, what we’re doing in our election research is to track all tweets by and @mentions of sitting members and candidates in the 2013 federal election. As more (especially minor party) candidates have become known, we’ve progressively extended our list as far as possible.

Based on this approach, last week we saw a substantial shift in attention towards Opposition Leader Tony Abbott: over the course of the week, he was @mentioned more than 4,000 times more often than his opponent, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. This week, the pendulum has swung back in Rudd’s favour, by almost exactly the same margin. Here are the leading politicians’ @mentions over the three weeks since the election was called on 4 August – Rudd leads Abbott in @mentions on every day except for Sunday (the day of the Coalition’s official campaign ‘launch’):

It’s tempting to draw the parallels between these ups and downs and the movement of the latest polls, which have also generated some more positive news for Rudd (one recent poll even has the parties at an even 50:50). However, things are rarely that simple. We already saw that the previous week’s boost in @mentions for Abbott was generated in part by (often critical) commentary about his comments about marriage equality and the “sex appeal” of a Liberal candidate; this week, Rudd’s more feisty performance in the second leaders’ debate, and in particular his response to Tony Abbott’s question “does this guy ever shut up?”, but also the subsequent rumours about his treatment of one of the make-up staff, all contribute to his greater number of @mentions. As with Abbott during the previous week, the volume of @mentions is far from implying universal support, then.

Overall, then, the past fortnight leaves the two major party leaders virtually inseparable – only the late surge of @mentions during the Liberal party campaign ‘launch’ pushes Tony Abbott into the top spot, by fewer than 150 @mentions over a two-week period in which Rudd and Abbott were each mentioned about 55,000 times, according to our data. If there is one major take-away from all this, it’s the fact that the election remains close – the Twitter audience hasn’t switched off from paying attention to either leader or his party yet.

In this light, the fact that Rudd maintains a handy lead in @mentions over the longer term (for our purposes here, from 1 July onwards) becomes somewhat immaterial. As I’ve noted before, the flurry of government activity after Rudd’s return to the Prime Ministership, and the weeks of speculation about the eventual election date, have contributed their share to the substantially greater number of @mentions the PM has received over this time. Since 4 August, and especially over the last weeks, though, the two leaders’ trajectories have tracked each other closely.

What the longer-term trajectories do show, however, is that it’s Abbott whose Twitter prominence has improved. Rudd’s trajectory is largely steady; with slight upward or downward aberrations, he’s added some 26,000 @mentions to his count each week, and that rate has increased only slightly since the election proper was called on 4 August. Looking at Rudd’s trajectory alone, you’d be hard-pressed to identify the start date of the campaign. For Abbott, that’s a different matter: before the start of the campaign, he was averaging some 12,000 @mentions per week; since then, he’s adding a Rudd-like 26,000 @mentions to his tally. That, in a graph, is the difference between being merely the Opposition Leader, and being a key contender for the Prime Ministership.

Close observers might have noticed already that we have a new entrant amongst the other leading (that is, most @mentioned) politicians this week: Finance Minister Penny Wong (@SenatorWong). From a slow start to the campaign, she’s recently caught up with Scott Morrison in the number of @mentions received. Indeed, on at least one count, Wong enters in first place with a bullet: last Thursday, she received the most retweets on a single day of any political leader during the campaign to date.

Time, then, to take a closer look at retweets during the campaign so far. The first and most obvious observation is that retweets of politicians’ messages make up only a minute part of all the @mentions these accounts have received to date; even the two major party leaders have only received a few thousand retweets in total during the three weeks of the campaign so far.

This makes some sense, of course. Twitter users may not see the point in retweeting already well-known politicians: with his 1.38 million followers, for example, what additional visibility does Kevin Rudd gain from being retweeted by you or me? If we are retweeting any of them, then, it would have to be because we want to explicitly endorse one of their messages – so with this in mind, here’s a quick tour through the most retweeted messages by the leading politicians to date.

The field is led by Penny Wong, whose stinging reply to a clichéd comment about marriage equality (from an account which has since been renamed or deleted) earnt her more than 1,000 (manual as well as button) retweets on Thursday alone:

Gee, highly original. Hope your one follower enjoyed it. RT @corrigan_brett: @SenatorWong marriage is for Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve.”

— Senator Penny Wong (@SenatorWong) August 21, 2013

Tony Abbott, by contrast, made the early running, but has since failed to pick up any further large numbers of retweets. His tweet on the night of 4 August, immediately following the begin of the election period, was a US-style call to the Coalition faithful, complete with presidential photo, to show their support by retweeting.

The Choice is clear. RT if you support the Coalition #auspol pic.twitter.com/O6wLMXbA9N

— Tony Abbott (@TonyAbbottMHR) August 4, 2013

This was preceded by another widely retweeted message, designed to show off Abbott the family man as he retweeted and responded to a message by daughter Bridget:

“@bridgetabbott: Wishing Dad @TonyAbbottMHR the best of luck over the coming 5 weeks! Can’t wait to join him on the campaign trail” Me too!

— Tony Abbott (@TonyAbbottMHR) August 4, 2013

(Daughters Bridget and Frances also feature in Abbott’s smaller spike on 9 August as he retweets their messages from a family afternoon at the Brisbane Ekka, and other users retweet his retweets.)

Meanwhile, Greens Leader Christine Milne’s best day came during the first televised leaders’ debate, from which she was excluded – several of her tweets were passed along by Greens supporters during the debate, following a public encouragement from the collective @GreensMPs account and individual party colleagues to do so. Here’s a flavour – if this tweet is representative, the Greens social media team still need to work on framing their shots effectively, though:

No matter how hard Tony Abbott tries to stop renewable energy revolution, it is unstoppable. It is everywhere. pic.twitter.com/5Q8OkGt1KK

— Christine Milne (@senatormilne) August 11, 2013

By contrast, in spite of a steady but limited flow of day-to-day retweets, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd hasn’t yet managed to generate a substantial spike in retweets during the campaign – perhaps it’s time for a sneaky selfie again? He came closest perhaps with this – also very US-style – tweet ahead of the first debate, combining both semi-formal publicity shot with some light-hearted text:

I have lots of official briefs for the debate. Does anyone have some good jokes? KRudd pic.twitter.com/H1WlB8mKhk

— Kevin Rudd (@KRuddMP) August 11, 2013

Again, Rudd’s comparatively massive follower base on Twitter means that he is least dependent of all Australian politicians on getting his messages retweeted – and indeed, that Twitter users may be least likely to feel a need to retweet him. That said, however, like any campaign team the Labor camp would surely be interested in encouraging retweets from the faithful to show that there is good grassroots support for the party and its leader – so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we saw some more US-style, image-heavy posts that are designed to be retweeted from Kevin Rudd’s account.