Prime minister most-mentioned leader on Twitter: PoliDashboard

If mentions on Twitter equal votes, Prime Minister Stephen Harper would win a majority government, according to Twitterverse. Students and researchers from the Ryerson Social Media Lab (external link)  at Ted Rogers School of Management have created a new web-based tool that monitors and quantifies Twitter conversations on the federal election in real time.

Launched on Sept. 15th, PoliDashboard is an online tool that collects, analyses and visualizes every tweet on Canadian politics and the federal election containing the hashtags #cdnpoli and #elxn42.

The interactive tool enables politicians, voters, and the media to track the hundreds of thousands of election-related tweets shared by Canadians each week. It is also designed to detect trends as well as discover influencers.

“There are many Twitter dashboards currently available, but PoliDashboard is unique in that it is live and is automatically updated in real-time with each new election-related tweet,” says Philip Mai, research and communications manager at the lab who supervised the group of students on the project.

Key highlights of PoliDashboard (as of 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday Sept. 30):

• The majority (nearly 51 per cent) of over 350,000 tweets mentioned Prime Minister Stephen Harper, followed by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau (22.8 per cent), NDP leader Thomas Mulcair (nearly 21 per cent) and Green party leader Elizabeth May trailing at 5.5 per cent.
• By city: Toronto leads the way with the most tweets about the party leaders with nearly 15,000 tweets, most of them mentioning the prime minister. Quebecers are the least politically engaged on Twitter: only some 400 tweets have been sent.
• The three top trending topics associated with #cdnpoli and #elxn42 are “debatdeschefs”, “debate” and “gpc”.
• The top three self-identified political “leaning or affiliation” of Twitter user who tweeted using either the #cdnpoli and/or the #elxn42 hashtag are: “conservative”, closely followed by “liberal” and then “green”(e.g. there are more people who included the word “conservative” in their Twitter profiles than there are those who identified as “liberal”, “green”, “progressive” or “independent”).

So what does this tell us?

“This analytics dashboard gives users a chance to gauge the pulse of the electorate in real time, showing what Canadians on Twitter are thinking about right at the moment,” says Shawn Menzies, one of the student researchers working on the PoliDashboard.

In the coming weeks, the lab will be releasing a series of analyses that will show who is the most influential in the election conversation, along with an analysis of the tweeting habits of the party leaders and the image they are portraying, as well as examining the comments posted on each party’s Facebook page to see how they are engaging with their followers.

Dashboard: polidashboard.com (external link, opens in new window) 
Follow: @SMLabTO

Blog on PoliDashboard: http://bit.ly/1KzKu1v (external link) 

Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University is Canada’s leading entrepreneurial-focused business school shaping the country’s next generation of global leaders. Home to six schools of management, two Ryerson MBA programs, a Masters of Science in Management program and 14 cutting-edge research centres, institutes & labs, the faculty’s focus on academic rigor, combined with real-world experience, provides students with experiential learning and critical thinking skills needed to solve challenges facing today’s global economy. ryerson.ca/tedrogersschool