Yesterday we published a report on Twitter & UK politics. We were overwhelmed by the feedback, coverage and debate that it sparked - so thank you to all the contributed.

We thought it would be helpful to address some of the most frequent points of feedback:

1) Number of followers alone don’t reflect influence. This is not a simplistic approach, it’s simply put, wrong - follower numbers can be easily gamed through schemes to artifically inflate numbers. You follow a bot, ten more are spawned and follow you, and so on - these aren’t real people but machine generated bots. Here’s a simple example: this morning, a blogger places on top of his list of Tories on Twitter an account that has more followers than the Conservative party, and more than @guidofawkes and @timmontgomerie combined - algorithms aren’t even needed here: common sense alone is sufficient to say that this is odd: the patterns within followers/followings highlight the odditties. Our algorithims detect such patterns across Twitter, but you can also scroll through followers as they’re quite obvious.

Tim Montgomerie is more influential than others (despite having less followers than many) because of the number mentions and retweets he receives. Coincidentally, this assumption is probably correct off Twitter too: what makes sense is in most cases correct.

Our comment (party machine v grassroots) is reflective of the comparative influence and reach of the parties official accounts and those of MPs and PPC - the opposing trends within the two main parties are very clear in the numbers.

2) Many pointed out that Boris Johnson is the most followed politician on Twitter - for reasons which we hope are clear (especially to those aspiring to become an MP) he wasn’t included in our listings of MPs and PPCs. He is though included in our listings around News & Comment. We should also point out that @mayoroflondon is not Boris Johnson’s account, but the account of the institution he represents, in the same way @downingstreet is not the account of Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister.

3) Categorisation - Our report is divided into four simple categories: 1) MPs 2) PPCs 3) Parties 4) News & Comment (media sources, journalists, bloggers and “influencers” (those that influence and impact the political debate), and all the tables and data are presented through these categories. While, for the purpose of clarity, lists are an arbitrary pastiche, and the risk of bundling everyone together in an arbitrary way without a clear method or criteria is confusing - one easily slips into speculation, from facts backed by data into the bias opinion of one.

Twitter is much larger than the followers one has - Tweetminster analyses the crowd and the platform in their entirety to aggregate, analyse and present data.

Posted at Tue, Jan 26th 2010, 09:33
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