Each day Tweetminster tracks the volume of news stories and conversations around the three main parties on Twitter.

This metric tells us several things:

1. how many stories there are about the parties in the media each day
2. how widely these stories are being shared and discussed
3. the frequency with which people are talking about these stories, and the diversity of conversations and opinions that are being shared.

We thought it would be interesting to plot the volume of stories and conversations around the three main parties over a period of time.

The following graph does just that and shows volume of stories and conversations for the past 9 working days (i.e. February 1st to February 11th, weekends excluded):

The graph clearly shows a consistently greater volume of conversations and stories around the Conservative party. The trend is further highlighted by looking at totals and averages per party:

• The Conservatives averaged 218.4 stories and conversations per day, totalling 1966.
• Labour averaged 179.6 per day and totalled 1617.
• The Liberal Democrats average 47.2 per day and totalled 425 stories and conversations.

Simply put, this means a combination of: a) more news stories about the Conservatives are being shared b) there are more conversations about the Conservatives than there are around the other main parties.

Tweetminster also tracks the most shared and mentioned links/URLs around the main parties, which are helpful in understanding the trends behind the volume. For the purpose of this analysis we categorised links in to simple categories:

• official party communications
• news pertinent to one of the main parties
• stories, conversations and analysis around official announcements
• stories & conversations that scrutinise or criticise (i.e. are negative towards) official communications

We found that:

• the most frequently shared links and conversations tend to be around the Conservative Party.
• these include: official communications from the Conservative Party, stories and conversations, both negative and positive, around these announcements and news stories pertinent to the party. In all these groupings, the volume around the Conservative party is greater than around both Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
• the majority of “labour-related” stories and conversations tend to be around “neutral” Government-related news and conversations around these stories, both positive and negative.
• there is likely to be a combination of both scrutiny and “negativity” at play. Either way, it would seem that negative stories tend to be more widely shared than positive ones.
• stories and conversations around the Liberal Democrats rarely go beyond the “party network”
• the mainstream media’s focus is mainly split between the Government and the Conservative Party.

We look forward to your thoughts.

Posted at Fri, Feb 12th 2010, 15:17
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