For those of us who work in digital communication and follow politics, yesterday’s announcement by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty that the Finance Department will be Twittering the budget speech next week is another milestone in making Canada’s government more digitally engaged. Oddly, Mr. Flaherty is not a Twitter user himself.
In fact, only 20 per cent of MPs are active Twitterers. That’s a statistic that represents concerns held by some of the impassioned Canadian “digerati”, particularly since the digital economy is becoming a popular topic of discussion in the federal government.
Which makes this the perfect opportunity to look at how MPs are using social media, if at all.
I’ve just completed the white paper, House of Tweets: Twitter and the House of Commons (click here to download a copy). The paper examines the distribution of the federal political parties based on their use of Twitter, which MPs are applying their innate network building skills to social networks and what our federal politicians can do to become engaged with their constituents.
The white paper tells a much different story about party distribution in the House of Commons and identifies MP Twitter accounts with large followings that aren’t being used to great effect, while other MPs with small (yet growing) followings are building their own influence in the digital world — influence that could become an important asset in elections and leadership campaigns. Another group of MPs have accounts they’ve done little or nothing with.
I’ve created Twitter lists for each federal party in the House of Commons. The following links are open to the public and allow you to follow the latest Twitter activity from all Twittering MPs.
I’ll do my best to keep these lists up to date.
For the REAL political junkies, I highly recommend PoliTwitter.ca. It’s hard to describe what a fantastic resource that site is. It includes everything from basic information about our MPs and their digital footprints, to following Twitter activity in real-time (complete with a translate button which automatically toggles the selected tweet between English and French) and displaying summary statistics about online activity for each party and MP.
By the way, the report has been released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license. This means you’re free to copy, share and quote the report provided you do so with attribution to the author (provide a link to this post if you share the document online), do not charge for copies of the report.
Fleishman-Hillard SVP Mark Senak published the report Twongress: The power of Twitter in Congress in January.
