Last night while I was tweeting about this weeks Twitter Stats I got into a discussion about the number of tweets sent by the Internet Party. There were some, including myself, who were surprised that the Internet Party were again not at the top of the stats. In fact this week they only just bet out the Act Party.
This low number of tweets came on top of the two social media experiments I have done this week, here and here, and the experience of Ryan. As I promised Sacha, I did a graph of the number of tweets sent each week by National, Labour, the Greens and the Internet Party.
The Internet party have been talking up how they are going to use social media to connect to voters who haven’t traditionally been catered too. But for much of the period covered the Internet Party are not that far ahead, or are in fact behind, the Greens. The Internet Party have been well ahead of Labour and National, but they are not the parties that the Internet Party are really targeting to gain votes from. Based on what I see in my timeline, I had a feeling that the Internet Party may be more active with retweeting, but I checked Twitonomy and that isn’t the case.
They both sit around the 40% mark.
What I find most interesting about the graph is that National and Labour are both, in general, tracking along similar paths. There is the obvious gap, but the gap seems to stay pretty constant, apart from that last few weeks. However the Greens and the Internet Party shake things up and trade the most tweets a bit more often.
I am still surprised that for a party, that has been talking up the use of social media as part of its campaign, the Internet Party are not clear and away the leader for the most tweets each week. Or at least more consistent in their activity.
