Performance of candidates' Twitter accounts in the 2012 Quebec elections

While last week I wrote a  Social Media 101 guide for candidates in the 2012 Quebec elections  and yesterday I presented the  Twitter accounts of the parties , here is the analysis of the Twitter accounts of the candidates, more than 238 Twitter accounts. Dated August 6, 2012.

Parties analysed  : Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ), Parti Québécois (PQ), Option Nationale (ON), Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), Québec Solidaire (QS) and Green Party (PV).

Limitation of the study  : Some party websites were not up to date, so we relied, in some cases, on official Twitter lists. The Twitter account analyzed was that of the candidate and not of the county when both existed.

GONE

The party with the most candidates on Twitter is the PLQ, which has 64 . Then comes the PQ with 60, ON with 51, QS with 27, CAQ with 23 and finally the Green Party with 13 candidates on Twitter.

The party with the highest rate of candidates on Twitter is the PLQ, of which 52.9%  of candidates have a Twitter account. Here is the rate of use of Twitter by the parties:

The CAQ percentage is an approximation since the official site does not disclose the number of candidates, the figure 121 was assumed.

If we look at the number of subscribers on Twitter , one party stands out from the others: the PQ. With more than 138,246 subscribers, it is the party that currently has the largest number.

If we look at the  number of subscriptions , it is the QS candidates who are subscribed to the largest number of users, i.e. 30,834.

In terms of the  ratio between the number of subscribers and the number of subscriptions  – which is normally a sign of popularity – it's the CAQ's turn to shine with a ratio of 4.949 subscribers per subscription. The PQ is not far behind with a ratio of 4.831. On the other hand, we can circumvent the explanation by saying that a party is more attentive to its subscribers by subscribing to them in turn.

One number that can speak to the age of Twitter accounts is the number of tweets. The older an account is, the more tweets it will have in general. The party with the most tweets per candidate is the CAQ with an average of 2069 tweets . This figure is very high since there are a few users with a lot of tweets. If we remove the top 2 in terms of number of tweets, the average would drop to 470.

We note that the Liberal Party of Quebec has the most candidates on Twitter, but most of them seem to have opened their account very recently.

CANDIDATES

If we look at the number of candidates on Twitter, there are currently 238 candidates on Twitter, according to official party lists and websites. These 238 candidates have an average of 1237 subscribers and 451 subscriptions . 

The most popular candidate on Twitter is Amir Khadir of the QS party  with over 27,517 followers. Here are the top 10 candidates with the most followers on Twitter. The digit to the right of the party corresponds to the Klout score . We note that the highest Klout score is François Legault with 69. 

Finally, if we look at the number of mentions by candidate (in the last 7 days as of August 6) , we see immediately that François Legault has the most mentioned Twitter account of all with 13,267 mentions the last week. . The number of mentions unfortunately does not indicate the sentiment (positive or negative) of the tweets. Here is the number of mentions of the other candidates: