Digital Politics
Following the online success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign much was made of the potential impact of online electioneering and in particular social networks here in the UK. So following the results of the European elections I’ve taken a look at how the 6 parties with the largest share of the vote in England compare across the two most talked about social networks of the moment; Facebook and Twitter.
What I found was that the online audience broadly reflects the vote overall although fringe parties clearly look to use their online presence effectively to punch above their weight in terms of the online share of voice. Nevertheless only 32,764 people follow the 6 main parties on Facebook representing just 0.02% of the vote in the European Election. This compares with 2% of voters who were following Barack Obama in last years US presidential election (2.6m people).
