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Political Party Conference 2013 social media report

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At MHP, we monitor millions of conversations for clients every day. This year, we decided to bring that function to bear on the party conference season here in the UK. We’ve been working with our partners Synthesio – a digital monitoring tool that measures sentiment across online and social media – to monitor the online conversation across the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative party conferences. Throughout all three we have measured the level of debate and discussion across all social media platforms, including Twitter, mainstream media, blogs and forums. Our analysis breaks down and compares the share of voice and sentiment between all three conferences, the leaders and specific policy areas. We’ve also analysed the top ten political blogs that have driven conversation at conference.

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Page 1: Political Party Conference 2013 social media report

@MHPPolitics social media analysis of the party conference season A report by MHP communications October 2013

Page 2: Political Party Conference 2013 social media report

As the dust settles on yet another long and tiring party conference season, MHP – in collaboration with Synthesio – have been looking back at the social media coverage of all three conferences and the reaction they received across different social media platforms.Conservative Party Conference generated the most conversation on twitter:

Of this conversation – and where opinion was expressed – the sentiment breakdown was as follows:

19%

22%59%

#ldconf 26,725

#lab13 31,558

#cpc13 82,434

Positive

Negative

Positive

Negative

Positive

Negative

#ldconf #lab13 #cpc13

63% 50% 51%

50% 49%37%

Share of voice

MHP tweets from conference

Page 3: Political Party Conference 2013 social media report

Over 21,000 social media comments referenced David Cameron, more than double mentioning Ed Miliband and four time more than Nick Clegg.

Nick Clegg 4,986

Ed Miliband 8,950

David Cameron 21,082

Number of social media comments

14%

26%60%

The Leader’s are still king

David Cameron

21,082

Nick Clegg4,986

Ed Miliband

8,950

MHP tweets from conference

Page 4: Political Party Conference 2013 social media report

Analysing the volume of social media comment around specific politicians, it is clear that the party leaders dominate the traffic, with their Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet colleagues struggling to get noticed.

However, traffic is not always positive. As we can see below (excluding factual neutral comments), social media traffic about David Cameron over the Conservative Party Conference remained on average negative. While comments about Ed Miliband became on average more negative as his conference went on. Only Nick Clegg saw a spike in favourable tweets during his Party Conference.

Social media sentiment of the Party Leaders over conference

Ed Miliband

Shadow Cabinet

David Cameron

Conservative frontbenchers

Nick Clegg MP

Leading Lib Dems

Ed versus the rest David versus the restNick versus the rest

70%

30%

56%

44% 40%

60%

-60

-40

-20

0

20

40

60

Net

pos

itiv

e/ne

gat

ive

soci

al m

edia

com

men

t %

Sat Sun Mon Tues Weds

80

Nick Clegg

Ed Miliband

David Cameron

Cameron’s speech

MHP tweets from conference

Clegg’s speech

Miliband’s speech

Page 5: Political Party Conference 2013 social media report

Top ten political blogs driving conversation across all three conferences

Our monitoring covered all social media platforms, and whilst Twitter has clearly increased its influence as the key platform for sharing ideas and opinions at party conference, the following top ten political blogs attracted a significant amount of traffic.

Influencer definitionSynthesio is a digital monitoring tool that measures sentiment, chatter and buzz across millions of sources globally. One of the leading global tools of its kind, Synthesio analyses content from over 100 countries in over 50 languages.

The Synthesio Influencer score given for sources takes into account different meta data depending on what media types are being analysed. For mainstream media, blogs and forums Synthesio incorporate Google and Alexa Page Rank data along with the total number of on-topic mentions. For forums, where data is public we also include the size of membership the community has.

Position Blog Synthesio influencer scorecard1 The Guardian 4,805

2 Spectator 2,317

3 The Telegraph 1,600

4 Mirror 727

5 LabourList 633

6 Daily Express 597

7 BBC News 563

8 Huffington Post 514

9 New Statesman 492

10 ITV 440

MHP tweets from conference

Page 6: Political Party Conference 2013 social media report

Share of conversation by policy area

We’ve looked at the data and broken the share of voice down by policy area.

Despite the emphasis on laying out their claim for economic credibility, ‘Health and Social Care’ was the most talked about topic at the Conservative conference. A statistic perhaps best explained by the 50,000 strong demonstration on Sunday and its focus on combating any potential cuts to the NHS:

Conservative

Labour

Liberal Democrats

Health and Social Care

Economy

Transport

Energy

Education

Foreign Affairs

Health and Social Care

Economy

Transport

Energy

Education

Foreign Affairs

Health and Social Care

Economy

Transport

Energy

Education

Foreign Affairs

MHP tweets from conference

Page 7: Political Party Conference 2013 social media report

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