Why doesn’t the Tory MP have Twitter friends?
This is a map of the eight Westminster MPs who are currently on Twitter, and the relationships between them. The larger the blob, the more followers they have among their peers. Apparently they’re a fairly clubbable lot, all – that is – except for Grant Shapps who (it seems) currently has no MP friends on Twitter. I’d say that it’s early days yet, but Mr Shapps appears to have been broadcasting since March 9th 2008. That’s an age in Twitter years. In that period, he has replied to 5 people out of a total of 249 tweets. Lots of people have tried to reach him.
I think that it’s nice that he’s so busy (after all, he has a constituency to run and a government to topple) but do think that if he’s going to do this, he ought to pay a little more attention.
Who (other than each other) are MPs most likely to follow? If we wanted to get a story in front of their noses, who would we most want to talk to? Here’s the list. Tweetminster is like Tweetcongress but with more tea and scones and fewer public representatives. The ubiquitous Stephen Fry is in place, of course. It wouldn’t be Twitter without him.
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Nice little bit of analysis Mat.
I am constantly surprised how few MPs and councillors are using Twitter at all, yet alone using it effectively… Fingers crossed the early adopters will bring some of the party faithful on too…
The two most impressive users I’ve seen so far are @tom_watson and @lynnefeatherstone. I know he’s not an MP, but I’ll be interested in seeing how @peter_mandelson — who joined yesterday I think — gets on.
I’m surprised @willhowells isn’t higher up the list – he seems to be leading the Lib Dems’ vanguard…
This is a really interesting analysis!
You might be interested in knowing that there is an additional MP on Twitter now, and PPC’s have been added to Tweetminster (the patterns are similar to those shown with MPs, which is interesting).
Interesting MP-to-MP analysis: http://tinyurl.com/97ea5r by @mediaczar
I see I’m there right at the bottom
Chris – I’m followed by both LibDem MPs. I follow Tom W because of his tech interest and Tom H because he tweets about Doctor Who, but neither follow me back (and Tom W seems to block activists from other parties if he notices them).
There has been an exponential growth of members to Twitter since December 2008. MP’s will join, but Dr Blockbuster doesn’t expect them to be in the forefront of this surge in membership.
Most MP’s email addresses have a polite return message that refers to the voluminous correspondence they get and refers to a protocol of dealing with constituent questions. Whilst Twitter is an added communication tool, if they can’t handle (quite rightly) correspondence from all over the UK, how are they going to manage questions from all over the Globe? :smiles:
Some may feel a duty to join. In the longer term their membership on Twitter will probably mirror their membership of Facebook.
Early days yet on Twitter for MP’s!
@alanburkittgray about 10 Wetsminster MP’s tweeting, see following etc and http://tinyurl.com/97ea5r
I think the question should be ‘why does the mp have no friends?’ and the answer is the same as everybody else who spends too much real time on twitter/facebook/bebo/myspace etc… None of these people have friends clearly.
Ally McFally — point taken. You may have misread some of what I said, so I’d like to make it clear.
1) Grant Shapps (or @grantshapps as he is on Twitter) follows 212 people on Twitter, and is followed by 322. He’s quite popular in Twitter terms, but not very. Jonathan Ross (or @wossy) has 46K people following him. That’s a pretty good following (all data retrieved on February 3, 2009) So Shapps isn’t without Twitter friends.
2) What I’ve been looking at is “peer networks” — that is, groups of people who perform the same role, or who work at the same company or whatever, and whom you might expect to follow one another. It’s interesting to me that all the MP Twitter people I mapped more or less followed one another, and that they all apparently have chosen not to follow Shapps.
3) My suggestion was that this is because Shapps was mostly using Twitter as a broadcast channel; this has changed recently (there has been a flurry of @ messages and replies.)
4) As to “real friends” vs “virtual friends” I wonder whether people have always reacted in this way? Do you suppose that the emergence of the telephone, telegraph, or indeed postal services left concerned technophobes complaining that people who used such services clearly had no real friends?
My friends on Facebook are real people. I think I can say that I’ve met every one of them at some time in the past, and that most of them I’ve met many times. Some of them are my relatives.
This is less true on Twitter; I have never, for example, met Barack Obama. But I have seen him on television, and have found him to be newsworthy. Direct messages from his campaign were (as a result) interesting to me, and offered an insight into how his campaign was progressing.
I’d suggest that your complaint may be the the same as me complaining that the people whom you watch on television or listen to on the radio aren’t your real friends either. Would you take me seriously if I said something like that?
Why doesn’t the Tory MP have Twitter friends? http://tinyurl.com/97ea5r
Where did you get your list of people with MPs following them on Twitter – I have several following me and I’m not on it!
[...] is a follow-up post to Why doesn’t the Tory MP have Twitter friends? — a report on some early research into the interrelationships between the few Westminster MPs [...]
Mat, this post inspired my most recent post: Labour’s twitter tsars http://www.digitalpublic.co.uk/blog/labours-twitter-tsars
V. pleased to see this; and do recommend that others go visit, but would have been nice to see a link (or at the v. least a credit) if this were indeed the case. Link-love should go both ways
[...] it’s interesting to note that less than 9 months ago Grant Shapps had no MP friends but now he’s the man to ‘follow’, demonstrating that building a constituency on Twitter can [...]
[...] has an analysis of MPs who ‘tweet’, and has come to the conclusion that Conservative MPs are not getting the conversational aspect of [...]