One of the biggest bangs to emerge from this week’s Labour Party Conference was The Sun’s endorsement of the Conservatives.

We ran a little experiment on the sentiment on Twitter around the story.

There were 248 tweets from MPs, journalists, commentators, PPCs and News Sources on Twitter relevant to the story.

While journalists and mainstream news sources clearly feel the endorsement was relevant and will have an impact in the run up to the next general election, the sentiment across Twitter is very much polarised: 54% of sentiment is strongly against the Sun’s position, 34% is aligned with the endorsement and 12% of tweets are neutral. These numbers could of course be due to the fact that Labour has a larger presence on Twitter.

But most importantly: people on Twitter don’t actually seem to care about the story (or the Sun has very few readers on Twitter) - this is evident in the only 60 odd tweets (equally split between pro- and anti-Sun) in the 24 hours since the Sun’s I’m Feeling Blue Campaign was launched - the campaign invited people to tweet in support of their endorsement using a #feelingblue hashtag.

Posted at Thu, Oct 1st 2009, 17:41
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