#ausvotes: Twitter Activity by Electorate

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 …

#ausvotes: The Australian Federal Election on Twitter, Week 4

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 …

#ausvotes: The Australian Federal Election on Twitter, Week 3

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 …

#ausvotes: Twitter Activity across the Electorates

Following on from yesterday’s update of overall Twitter activity patterns around Australian federal politicians’ and candidates’ accounts, here’s a slightly different look at the same data – and before I forget again, I want to say my sincere thanks to CCI researchers Darryl Woodford and Andrew Quodling for their work in pulling together and formatting …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, Weeks 28-32/2013

Seeing as we’re mostly occupied with tracking the use of Twitter in the Australian federal election campaign, this is an ultra-brief update on our Australian Twitter News Index, but it’s one which deserves to be pushed out in between the election coverage in order to keep us up to date. For the sake of brevity, …

#ausvotes: Networks of Interaction on Twitter

Earlier this week I posted the first of our analyses of how the Australian federal election campaign is unfolding on Twitter, based on our observation of the tweets from and @mentions of a large number of members’ and candidates’ accounts since 1 July. As an addendum to this post, and covering the same timeframe from …

Factcheck: Did Tony Abbott Buy Twitter Followers?

This past Sunday evening, the first reports emerged of a rapid and unusual increase in the number of Twitter and Facebook followers for Australian Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. An overall increase in followers during an election campaign is far from surprising, as our analysis of the follower growth curve for leading Australian politicians from June …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, Weeks 20-27/2013

Once again, too much time has passed between ATNIX updates; I hope to return again soon at least to regular monthly posts, but for the moment, this will need to be another two-month update. Several circumstances have combined to cause delays this time around: for one, Twitter finally transitioned to a new version of its …

Introducing Twitter Follower Accession Graphs

It’s been uncommonly quiet on this site for the last few weeks, as we’ve been busy with various projects, and overseas for a range of research activities. This may well prove to be the calm before the storm, though – we have a number of very exciting new social media research outcomes in the pipeline, …

#spill: How Twitter Reacted to the Labor Leadership Challenge

It’s that time of the electoral cycle again where the Australian Labor Party changes leaders in response to its flagging opinion polling. As with the 2010 leadership spill, which we touched on here, there was a great deal of activity on Twitter last night: the #spill hashtag, in particular, served as one forum through which …