Littera Deusto

Modern Languages, Basque Studies and Humanities

Spanish general elections 2011 and politicians Twitter attempt to win followers (and voters)

diciembre 12th, 2011 · No hay Comentarios

Since Zapatero made public last July that the elections would be brought forward, the candidates from the different parties have been giving particular importance to Microblogging usage, specially on Twitter. Candidates have been tweeting what they were doing or, what they intended to do, if they reached the power. The Nielsen Study has analyzed the Twitter accounts of Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba (PSOE) and Mariano Rajoy (PP) and shows that both politicians twitters were quite inexpressive and not too well developed. Ester Mascaró, looking through the Study, confirms that both accounts were not optimized.

Reviewing the study Ester Mascaró talks about the accounts of Rajoy (https://twitter.com/#!/MARIANORAJOY) and Rubalcaba (https://twitter.com/#!/conrubalcaba. (who has recently changed his account). She states that Rubalcaba had a bigger amplification because all of his tweets were retweeted more than 10 times while retweets of Rajoy’s tweets didn’t reach 9. Rubalcaba was also more active: 420 tweets and 4.322 retweets in October 2011. On the other hand, Rajoy and his team had only 192 tweets and 1726 retweets during the same month. Some of the tags related to PP and PSOE that had bigger influence were: #indignados, #15M, #nolesvotes #Rajoy and #Rubalcaba. The keywords used by both parties where similar being “ETA” the most mentioned one.

Both of them are “Twitter stars” as they have more than 10.000 followers, however, in Twitter, quality is more valuable than quantity, and, compared with other Twitter stars, maybe their Twitters are not so important or influential. The accounts are led by managing teams, although Rubalcaba and Rajoy tweet personally quite often. Rubalcaba signs as RbCb and Rajoy as MR. Ester Mascaró also quotes Carlos Guardian, who have analyzed their accounts with some aplications. The analysis made shows that both politicians during the campaing were inexpressive on their tweets not using any “emoticon”. The feedback is poor apart from the RT that supporters do, and the Timelines are just for political slogans that supporters retweet.

The activity of the two politicians reached the highest point the day of the debate between both of them. As Eduardo Ortega expressed: on November 7th, 2011, 9 out of 10 trending topics in Spain had to do with the debate (some of them, were #eldebate, #ReiniciaElDebate, #seacaboelcirco). This shows the impact the debate caused on Spanish society. As La Voz Libre quoted, it wasn’t as rich as expected and that’s why many people started making jokes about it. For example, Cazalla, the town in Sevilla, became trending topic when Rajoy made a mistake telling it was in Cadiz, and Campo Vidal, the moderator, became the focus of many tweets such as “Campo Vidal ha terminado 10 sudokus”. All this shows how critical Twitter can be with the most reprehensible aspects.

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Filed under: Microblogging, Web Communication Tagged: 20N, Elections, Microblogging, Politicians, Spain, Twitter, Web communication

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