Under the Dome
Report credits tweets with helping Tillis to victory
Roll Call is crediting Twitter with Thom Tillis U.S. Senate win over Democrat Kay Hagan.
Verifeed, a company that analyzes social media to predict trends, parsed electoral tweets in North Carolina from mid-August through Election Day to see if social conversations could predict the outcome of an election.
It found that Republicans engaged in almost 14 times the number of people on Twitter as Democrats in the final week of the campaign.
According to the report: “Republican activists outperformed Democrats in sheer volume – and resonance – of tweets, with a veritable army of party activists faithfully retweeting and favoriting each other’s tweets regularly, if not hourly. The result calculated by Verifeed in the final seven days was direct engagement with 15,436,367 people by the top 20 GOP influencers – more than 14 times that of the top 20 Democratic influencers, who by contrast engaged just 1,746,178 people on Twitter.”
The articles also notes that in the election’s final weeks, Tillis out-tweeted Hagan.
And what were all those tweets about? Obamacare, the economy and the education were big topics but in the 23 days right before the election, the GOP tweeted more about Ebola than any other topic – 997 tweets that reached 3.3 million people, the article says.
The analysis: The tweets inspired the party faithful and got them out to vote.
Comments