Twitter Comparison of Alberta PC Leadership Candidates

September 17, 2011 7:55 am 2 comments

Yesterday I wanted to take a look at who was talking about who on Twitter.  Here’s the comparison on Twitter using tweetreach.com between the 6 Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership candidates.

Starting with lowest to highest Twitter reach and discussion:

Doug Horner: 3,709 people reached

Rick Orman: 4,616 people reached

Gary Mar: 7,879 people reached

Ted Morton: 8,402 people reached

Alison Redford: 8,554 people reached

Doug Griffiths: 16,332 people reached

Now as you can see these samples were taken yesterday evening and cover 50 tweets.  To have a more interesting look, one might take these readings hourly throughout a 24 hour period.  However, I’ve got a life and won’t be doing that.  This is simply a snapshot of the ebbs and flows of Twitter conversation related to the leadership race of the Alberta PC Party.  I still find it interesting though.  The folks in the movie industry take detailed research on Twitter to predict whether a movie will be a financial winner based on the conversation, volume, sentiment, influencers associated etc…

I think this is too small a sample to truly have any real significance but it’s still interesting to see.  What do you think?

UPDATED

Based on the interest and my own curiosity I thought I would do a quick update of the numbers, so I took some more samples between 12 and 1pm today Saturday.  Take into consideration the time of day, also that this is now a weekend day and more people have the freedom to be online.  Also, it’s important to take into consideration the idea of “sentiment”.  Having a really high reach number but having a percentage of the tweets be negative attacks by opposition party supporters etc…so we should keep things in context.  Also, I like to look for breadth of accounts, are the tweets just made up of a few supporters or do we have a large list of people engaged?

Here are samples taken just a few minutes ago:

Again they are organized in ascending order.

Rick Orman: 3,062 people reached

Doug Horner: 3,808 people reached

Ted Morton: 4,863 people reached

Doug Griffiths: 11,472 people reached

Gary Mar: 13,126 people reached

Alison Redford: 18,073 people reached

What would be most interesting would be to dissect these samples to see the account demographics for each candidate, that would require a lot of work but it would reveal at least by appearance if for example Alison Redford is getting a majority of twitter conversation from women.  I wonder how much of the vote will be affected by those types of subset variables.  Further, is Doug Griffiths getting the 18-34 year old vote?  Where are the brands sitting in this regard?  

What do you think? 

UPDATED SATURDAY AT 5:00PM

All samples are in ascending order, we can see once again some have shifted in terms of general activity and discussion around their account.

Doug Horner: 3,748 people reached

Rick Orman: 5,114 people reached

Ted Morton: 7,126 people reached

Gary Mar: 7,150 people reached

Alison Redford: 10,338  people reached

Doug Griffiths: 14,365 people reached

Well, approximately 5 hours later, it seems the Griffiths camp continues to engage online, while the other camps have dropped considerably.  With approximately an 1.5 hours left until the poll stations close this will be the last update I’ll probably do.  Noticeably in this batch of samples is the discussion of Simon Ostler of CTV Edmonton news.  He shows up in all but Doug Horner’s stream… 

Thanks very much for reading and your comments on Twitter and here on our blog.

  • http://twitter.com/markyeg Mark

    Interesting statistics Walter although I don’t think it’ll translate into election results as many PC members are older/out of touch with technology.

    • http://twitter.com/fusedlogic Walter Schwabe

      Mark, yes these stats are not nearly detailed enough to extract voting trends…agree with your assessment of the demographic as well…