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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Bigot-gate and the role of social networks in the election
April 29, 2010
Gordon Brown’s unfortunate gaff yesterday – already inevitably christened ‘Bigot-gate’ – was the big political story yesterday, and probably the second major event of the election (after Nick Clegg’s success in the first leadership debate). Accordng to our daily search data we tracked 400 distinct search terms containing the word 'bigot' yesterday; the day before there were just seven. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet visits to political websites achieved a new high yesterday, increasing 20% on the previous day.
The fast moving nature of the story yesterday made it ideal Twitter-fodder, and it was a top trending topic. Social media is playing a significant role in the election; from increasing voter registration rates amongst the young, to driving traffic to the party homepages. As the chart below illustrates, the amount of upstream traffic that the main party homepages have been receiving from social networks has more than trebled as the election campaign has progressed.
But which social networks are sending the traffic? Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the three largest traffic sources, but the importance of the smaller sites varies by party. As the tables below illustrates, Issuu is a big source for all of the parties (traffic to the site has increased by 60% over the last fortnight). Other social networks having an impact include The Student Room (for the Liberal democrats and Conservatives) and Mumsnet (Labour).
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Posted by Robin Goad at 09:53 AM
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In Categories 2010 General Election | Politics | Social networks
Comments
Really interesting post Robin. I wrote a piece talking about the role media has played in the election so far - http://bit.ly/bN21c5. The upstream traffic graph above seems to corroborate the idea that the tv debate was the significant event that really kicked off internet and social media buzz around the election. Strange that no single party was able to have a big impact online until that point, despite their best efforts and strategies.
@adigoodsell
Posted by Adrian Goodsell | April 29, 2010 10:57 AM
Brown cracks me up, he will struggle tonight at the debate.
I'm not anti Labour but they honestly do not get other people's opinions and cannot take criticism.
How a man who isn't a people person can run the country is beyond me
Posted by Danny D | April 29, 2010 10:32 AM