We have seen an exciting development regarding Twitter use and the election this week. Julia Gillard has started engaging and is responding to the Tweets she is receiving.

The image to the right was a response Julia sent to a Tweet, I made before an interview with SBS on Saturday morning.

However, the really good news is that this response is not the only one. Julia has been regularly responding to Tweets since the clever Karalee Evans and Andy Pearce of Ammnesia Razorfish coaxed a response with a charity donation earlier in the week. Check out the full story on the Ammnesia election site.

As a result of her new approach, Julia’s engagement score has jumped from last week’s 11 to a much more respectable 49.45. Whilst a massive improvement, it is still not enough to beat our continuing TweetLevel leader Malcolm Turnbull.

Below are the top ten positions in the table. Tony Abbott lands at 22 this week. We have also added Tim Hollo who lands just outside of the top ten. You can check out his score here.

As we move into the last week of the election what impact will Twitter have on the final outcome? It will not be the deciding force, obviously, but nor will its impact be negligible. As Jim Macnamara pointed out in a story on SBS tonight:

No one thing will cause people to vote, not newspapers, not TV debates, not social media, but does social media have a role? Yes.

I couldn’t agree more with Jim. Social media does have a role to play. If most politicians continue to ignore it they are missing a trick. Follow this link to view the SBS story, which in addition to Jim, includes an interview with myself and Karalee Evans.

The list is not changing radically unfortunately. Turnbull continues to perform well and the Greens are increasing their influence, but Gillard and Abbott are all but ignoring Twitter during this election.

Some additions to the list, due to us previously missing them, is the AustralianLabor and David Parisaccounts. Sorry guys for missing you out. Keep up the good work, it is refreshing to see another Labor Tweep in the top ten. A shame your Liberal colleagues are not following.

Stay tuned, for our next update, where we may have something interesting to propose.

The team here at Edelman have an apology to make. In the first list we shared last week we used the wrong Twitter handle for former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Instead of KRuddMP, we used his old handle KRuddPM. This mistake had a massive impact on his score and place in the rankings. Including the correct Twitter account this week he jumps right to the top of the table just behind the enduring Malcolm Turnbull. The former PM’s massive following, close to 1 million, is the primary reason for his high ranking.

Beyond the addition of Kevin Rudd, the top of the table doesn’t show a lot of movement. PM contenders Gillard and Abbott continue to score terribly low in the engagement stakes, whilst the Greens continue to dominate the top of the table, despite having far fewer high profile contenders than the other major parties.

An interesting development and addition to the table is PeterBest4PM. A fictional character created by The Daily Telegraph, Peter’s policy decisions in the lead up to the election are being dictated by the people. Engage with him on Twitter, or via polls on the Daily Telegraph website to help shape his policy ahead of the election. His high placement in the list is driven primarily by his high level of engagement despite his low number of followers. Imagine the score Gillard or Abbott could be generating if they engaged at the same level of Peter or some of the Greens candidates.

Again if you have any additions for the list  or feedback on the research we would love to hear them. Drop us a note in the comment box below

Election 2010 offers politicians the opportunity to embrace an ever-maturing portfolio of social media platforms to engage with Australian voters, but are the politicians making the most of the available platforms?

Twitter, which counts around 1 million users in Australia, will no doubt have some influence on the conversations around the campaign, but research by Edelman suggests it is currently being underutilised.

To track Twitter’s influence, Edelman today launches a new tool for the election – the Political TweetLevel.

Through TweetLevel we’ll be tracking and  measuring the Twitter influence, trust, engagement and popularity of  Australia’s federal politicians, candidates and those working for them, during the campaign.

TweetLevel measures the influence of individuals on Twitter based on a number of factors (including re-tweets, followers, frequency of tweets, references etc measured by an algorithm).

But enough about the science and down to the findings.

At the end of the first week of campaigning the top ten most influential political Tweets are:

The battle for influence on Twitter is currently being won by the Greens taking out four of the top ten positions. Liberal and Labor equally make up the remaining spots in the top ten.

Top of the table holder, Malcolm Turnbull, scores well across the board highlighting his numerous followers and the fact that he is re-tweeted often and that he engages effectively in two way conversations. In general though, this is not the norm for the Liberals.

Both leaders Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott feature 3rd and 11^th respectively on the influence score, but this is due in main part to the high number of followers and the high number of re-tweets they are generating. Disappointingly however, both candidates are only using their Twitter channels to push content as opposed to using it to engage with Australian voters. Both engagement scores are woefully low.

Will the battle for votes be won by Twitter?  Not this time, but Twitter’s influence on the conversation and its use as a political organising tool cannot be underestimated.

Edelman will be updating the table regularly and is hoping it acts as an incentive for greater engagement between the Polies, their staff and the voters.

Who have we missed in the table? Drop us a note in the comment box and we will get them added ASAP.

What do you think? Should politicians be engaging more? Does Twitter matter? Why not leave us a comment?

TweetLevel is a Twitter measurement tool created by @jonnybentwood,@alexparish at Edelman

This tool is still in beta. Even though we believe that it goes a great way to understand and quantify the varying importance of different people’s usage of Twitter, by no means whatsoever do we believe we have fully solved the ‘influence’ problem. What we would appreciate is your views, your feedback, advice and criticism is crucial in helping us understand social media measurement.

Twitter lists the number of people each user follows. The tendency for most celebrities is to only follow a few individuals the more people that someone follows, there is an increased likelihood of them actively participating in conversations with the community instead of simply broadcasting to it. Following ranges were determined (i.e. more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (0 to 30) that was used as part of the algorithm. Note: Twitter opened its API to TweetLevel so that data could be sourced easily and quickly to benefit the user.

Twitter lists the number of people each user follows. Some Twitter users do not follow anyone but simply rely upon broadcasting what they have to say to all their followers. Some parts of the algorithm place a higher weighting on being engaged with a community and so following people is important but will not dramatically change someones score. Following ranges were determined (i.e. more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (0 to 30) that was used as part of the algorithm. Note: Twitter opened its API to TweetLevel so that data could be sourced easily and quickly to benefit the user.

How often does someone update what they are doing. This number is purely objective as it scores someone highly no matter what the content of their post (i.e. how relevant is it). Nevertheless it is assumed that if someone posts frequently but has poor content then their ‘followers’ will decrease. Update ranges were determined (i.e. more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (0 to 30) that was used as part of the algorithm.

e.g. @name How many people engage in conversation with an individual or point to their name. The clearest way to establish this is to run a search on the number of people who reference @username in a message. This calculation is based upon a combination of factors looking back 12 days, 1500 tweets and activity over the past 24 hours. The number of times this happens is calculated with each range was assigned a number (0 to 30) – again this was then used as part of the algorithm.

Has a tweet caused sufficient interest that it is worth re-submitting by others? Despite a great deal of ‘noise’ (i.e. posts that are not relevant or interesting), when someone sees something that is of high interest, their post can be re-tweeted. The clearest way to establish this is to run a search on the number of people who reference RT @username in a message. This calculation is based upon a combination of factors looking back 12 days, 1500 tweets and activity over the past 24 hours. The number of times this happens is calculated with each range was assigned a number (0 to 50) – again this was then used as part of the algorithm.

“This is a unique (and online) tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.” This 3rd party tool (which has opened its’ API to TweetLevel) is a useful method to combine automated metrics dependent upon criteria within posts and publicly available numbers. Where tools such as this are available, we incorporate them into the algorithm to achieve a more confident score. Twitalyzer gives users scores from 0 to 100. Ranges were determined (i.e. more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (0 to 20) that was used as part of the algorithm.

Signal-to-noise ratio is a measure of the tendency for people to pass information, as opposed to anecdote. Signal can be references to other people (defined by the use of “@” followed by text), links to URLs you can visit (defined by the use of “http://” followed by text), hashtags you can explore and participate with (defined by the use of “#” followed by text), retweets of other people, passing along information (defined by the use of “rt”, “r/t/”, “retweet” or “via”). If you take the sum of these four elements and divide that by the number of updates published, you get the “signal to noise” ratio. Twitalyzer gives users scores from 0 to 100. Ranges were determined (i.e. more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (0 to 20) that was used as part of the algorithm.

Twinfluence is an automated 3rd party tool that uses APIs to measure influence. For example: “Imagine Twitterer1, who has 10,000 followers – most of which are bots and inactives with no followers of their own. Now imagine Twitterer2, who only has 10 followers – but each of them has 5,000 followers. Who has the most real “influence?” Twitterer2, of course.” As with Twitalyzer, this index uses 3rd party tools to add greater confidence in the overall Twitter score. Similar to the other criteria, ranges were determined (i.e. less than 20, less than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (0 to 20) that was used as part of the algorithm.

Twitter Grader is the final automated tool to add greater confidence to the final index. This site creates a score by evaluating a twitter profile. Similar to the other criteria, ranges were determined (i.e. less than 20, less than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (0 to 20) that was used as part of the algorithm.

The Involvement Index is unique Edelman IP that calculates a score based upon how an indivdual engages with their community. It is calculated by analysing the content of an individual posts. People who score highest in this category have frequent, relevant, high-quality content that actively involved the twitter community (asking questions, posting links or commenting on discussions) and did not purely consist of broadcasting. Ranges were determined (i.e. less than 20, less than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (0 to 20) that was used as part of the algorithm.

As more people engage on Twitter, it may become harder to keep activity going. The velocity index measures changes on a regular basis and assigns a score based on increased or decreased participation. Ranges were determined (i.e. less than 20, less than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (0 to 20) that was used as part of the algorithm.

Each specific variable listed above was given a standard score out of 10. Using a weighting scale I varied the importance of the each metric to establish an individual’s total score.

The key variable is the number of people someone has following them. There are many online tools that show this such as Twitterholic

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The key variables are an individual’s participation with the Twitter community (as measured by the Involvement Index), with additional emphasis on the frequency of people name pointing an individual (via @username), the numbers of followers and the signal to noise ratio. Other attributes were included in the final score but were given a lower weighting.

The key variables in this instance is a combination of the number and authority of someone’s followers together with the frequency of people name pointing an individual (via @username) and the how many times and individuals posts are re-tweeted. Other attributes were included in the final score but were given a lower weighting.

The best measure of trust is whether an in individual is will to ‘trust’ what someone else has said sufficiently that they are also prepared to have what they tweeted associated with them. The key metric in this instance looks at combination of retweets and references (shown through ‘via’. Other attributes were included in the final score but were given a lower weighting.

During the recent election in the UK, our team in the London office carried out a similar research project.

So why not head over to the Edelman UK Election Blog to see how our Australian poli tweeters compare. Not so favourably I fear.

Why do you think the UK politicians are getting this whilst our aren’t?

If you’re interested, you can see how your own Twitter account compares with our leading politicians.

Simply enter your Twitter name on this site and wait for your score to appear.

Contact us

TweetLevel was created by Edelman and we are using the service to measure how Australia’s politicians are engaging with Australian voters on Twitter. We would be delighted to hear from you and receive feedback how we can make this better.

Via email on: matthew.gain@edelman.com

Via twitter on: @matthewgain

Via telephone on: +61 434 481 133

Business

We are able to run custom searches depending upon your requirements. For more please information contact  Matthew Gain

Media

We are happy to discuss TweetLevel with you. Please contact Matthew Gain