Nikki Kaye is the National MP for Auckland Central. She was first elected as an MP in 2008, beating the sitting Labour MP, becoming the first non left wing MP for the Auckland Central seat in 90 years.
Nikki is a medium level user of Twitter. She hasn’t sent as many tweets as some MPs, but is still a lot more active than others. The thing that I find most interesting is the fact that she follows more people than are following her. She is not the only MP that does this, nor at this level of followers, however I still haven’t figured out what is to be gained from this. I don’t think there is any way that a single human user could follow a feed of 9k+ people and gain any useful understanding from it.
Unlike some MPs, Nikki is pretty good at producing original tweets, without resorting to high levels of retweets. She also has 20% of her tweets getting retweeted, on average nearly 2.5 times per retweeted tweet.
Nikki has a good balance of policy and broadcast tweets versus personality and interesting tweets. With one of her roles being the Minister of Civil Defence, retweeting Civil Defence tweets is kinda obvious, but is a good thing for her to do.
There are the obvious policy related tweets in Nikki’s feed, but she has a way of making them more interesting and attention grabbing.
Nikki does a good amount of tweeting about things apart from politics, lots of tweets about visiting her Grandmother, plus tweets about things like ferry trips to Waiheke and Great Barrier. These are nice insights into the busy life of an MP, particularly one who serves an electorate that has some relatively remote parts, considering it is one of the most urban electorates in the country.
The photos Nikki posts of her trips as part of her trips are of a reasonable quality, better than some other MPs.
I have said this before about other MPs, but I will say it again. Posting things from your Facebook profile or page to Twitter doesn’t work. There are a number of examples in Nikki’s feed where the link at the end of the Tweet points at a website other than the Facebook post, which means if you are following her, you don’t get to see what the rest of the post says, without having to go out of your way to find it. If you are an MP and want to link to a Facebook post, just link directly too it as you would any other website, don’t connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
As an example of why linking them is a bad idea, I have included a screen grab here of the full Facebook post that is associated with the above tweet. It is obvious that the amount of information included is far beyond what a tweet can support. So Facebook is the better location. However, with the accounts being linked, all we get is the first bit, that doesn’t really encourage you to click on the link. I would suggest that it would be a better plan to link to the post, with a short, Twitter orientated status, designed to encourage engagement.
Nikki does have a sense of humour that comes through on Twitter.
Over all Nikki has a solid following on Twitter. She has a good habit of engaging with people who talk to her. It would be good to see someone with such a high profile to have a few more followers on Twitter. Particularly representing such a young electorate, I am sure there a high number of Twitter users in that electorate.
