{"id":2576,"date":"2013-08-27T16:03:25","date_gmt":"2013-08-27T06:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/?p=2576"},"modified":"2013-08-27T16:12:05","modified_gmt":"2013-08-27T06:12:05","slug":"ausvotes-the-australian-federal-election-on-twitter-week-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/2013\/08\/27\/ausvotes-the-australian-federal-election-on-twitter-week-3\/","title":{"rendered":"#ausvotes: The Australian Federal Election on Twitter, Week 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well. Another week of the Australian federal election campaign has just, um, flown<\/em> by \u2013 time, then, to take another look at how things played out on Twitter<\/em>. I\u2019ve taken slightly different approaches for my<\/a> various<\/a> updates<\/a> so far<\/a>, and this week we\u2019ll look at yet another aspect of the social media campaign: the different parties\u2019 attempts to encourage their supporters to retweet their messages.<\/p>\n

But first, another look at the headline figures \u2013 and just as a reminder, as I\u2019ve explained in the previous posts, what we\u2019re 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\u2019ve progressively extended our list as far as possible.<\/p>\n

Based on this approach, last week we saw a substantial shift in attention towards Opposition Leader Tony Abbott<\/a>: 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\u2019s favour, by almost exactly the same margin. Here are the leading politicians\u2019 @mentions over the three weeks since the election was called on 4 August \u2013 Rudd leads Abbott in @mentions on every day except for Sunday (the day of the Coalition\u2019s official campaign \u2018launch\u2019):<\/p>\n

\"Leaders<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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<\/a> even has the parties at an even 50:50). However, things are rarely that simple. We already saw that the previous week\u2019s boost in @mentions for Abbott was generated in part by (often critical) commentary about his comments about marriage equality and the \u201csex appeal\u201d of a Liberal candidate; this week, Rudd\u2019s more feisty performance in the second leaders\u2019 debate, and in particular his response to Tony Abbott\u2019s question \u201cdoes this guy ever shut up?<\/a>\u201d, but also the subsequent rumours about his treatment of one of the make-up staff<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\"Leaders<\/a><\/p>\n

Overall, then, the past fortnight leaves the two major party leaders virtually inseparable \u2013 only the late surge of @mentions during the Liberal party campaign \u2018launch\u2019 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\u2019s the fact that the election remains close \u2013 the Twitter<\/em> audience hasn\u2019t switched off from paying attention to either leader or his party yet.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve noted before, the flurry of government activity after Rudd\u2019s 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\u2019 trajectories have tracked each other closely.<\/p>\n

\"Leaders<\/a><\/p>\n

What the longer-term trajectories do show, however, is that it\u2019s Abbott whose Twitter<\/em> prominence has improved. Rudd\u2019s trajectory is largely steady; with slight upward or downward aberrations, he\u2019s 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\u2019s trajectory alone, you\u2019d be hard-pressed to identify the start date of the campaign. For Abbott, that\u2019s a different matter: before the start of the campaign, he was averaging some 12,000 @mentions per week; since then, he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

\"Retweets<\/a><\/p>\n

This makes some sense, of course. Twitter<\/em> users may not see the point in retweeting already well-known politicians: with his 1.38 million followers<\/a>, 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<\/em> endorse one of their messages \u2013 so with this in mind, here\u2019s a quick tour through the most retweeted messages by the leading politicians to date.<\/p>\n

The field is led by Penny Wong, whose stinging reply to a clich\u00e9d 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:<\/p>\n

\n

Gee, highly original. Hope your one follower enjoyed it. RT @corrigan_brett: @SenatorWong<\/a> marriage is for Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve.\u201d<\/p>\n

— Senator Penny Wong (@SenatorWong) August 21, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n