Parti Québécois: big winner on Twitter – Analysis of party accounts in the 2014 elections

Here is the analysis of the performance of the Twitter accounts of the parties in the provincial elections. This article looks at the performance of party accounts. This analysis was carried out between March 9 and 23, 2014.

Parties analysed  :  Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ) ,  Parti Québécois (PQ) ,  Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ)  and  Québec Solidaire (QS) . Tool used  : Radian6.

The performance of the candidates will be studied in a blog post to be published tomorrow. Until then, you can go fill out our survey on the influence of social media on voters.

NUMBER OF SUBSCRIBERS

If we look at the Twitter accounts of the parties running in the 2014 Quebec elections, the one with  the most subscribers is the Parti Québécois with 34,600 subscribers  as of March 23, 2014.

MENTIONS

If we look at the level of attention paid to the different parties , by analyzing the number of mentions of the different Twitter accounts, we see that the Parti Québécois is still first with more than 16,863 mentions of its Twitter account in the last 14 days, dated March 23. Here is the number of mentions of each party's Twitter accounts  : 

If we take the analysis a step further and look at the number of followers of those who mention political parties (excluding @replys so as not to count replies that only users who follow both accounts see),  we we then obtain the number of impressions of the Twitter accounts of the parties , therefore their importance in the twittosphere.

We note that the Parti Québécois is the Twitter account that had the greatest visibility during the period analyzed, i.e. 19,035,361 Twitter users who could have seen the Twitter account.

NUMBER OF RETWEETS

Then,  if we analyze the number of retweets of messages from political parties , we can see that the Parti Québécois is the party with the most retweets, 5,643 over the last 14 days.

Finally, if we calculate the number of tweets from each party,  we can come up with an average number of retweets per tweet . We can see that the Parti Québécois is the party that generates the most retweets per message on Twitter. We can think that this is due to the large number of candidates with a high number of subscribers.

THE BIG DIFFERENCES WITH THE LAST PROVINCIAL ELECTIONS

The number of account followers has doubled for most accounts, showing the growing importance of Twitter to parties.

The number of retweets, although the analysis covered 2 weeks instead of 1 in the 2012 analysis , increased greatly, from 1161 to 5643 for the Parti Québécois. The same goes for the average number of retweets per message, which rose from 4.35 to 18.20 for the Parti Québécois. 

Thomas.