Posts Tagged ‘Conservative Wall’

The Tweetminster webpage, where Conservative MPs are outnumbered by their Labour counterparts

As a newcomer to Twitter, I can’t help wondering why there are only 66 MPs signed up to a social media site that they could use daily to stay in touch with their constituents?

More importantly I find it bizarre that of the 66 MPs on Twitter there are more than 4 times as many Labour MPs (over 40) as Conservatives (9) on Twitter.

Why is this?

The Conservative Party website is full of videos, YouTube links, blogs and audio messages and there are a couple of extremely successful Conservative blogs like Order Order and Conservative Home (although not directly connected to the central Conservative Party). David Cameron has packed his Shadow Cabinet with media savvy figures like Jeremy Hunt - founder of Hotcourses - and spent the last 4 years spearheading Webcameron and the Conservative Wall - innovative uses of interactive media.

So why are they so behind on Twitter?

I am going to put forward a series of hypotheses that could explain this mismatch:

• 1. Proportion - I thought at first that because there are more Labour MPs in Parliament it could seem like more are tweeting when the proportions are the same. But there are 349 Labour MPs compared with 192 Conservative MPs, yet there are only 9 Conservative tweeters and over 40 Labour tweeters. In terms of proportion this means only 5% of Conservative MPs tweet whereas 11% of Labour MPs do - a clear Labour margin.
• 2. Age - The Conservative Party has often had a reputation as a party of older more traditional members, which could be seen as a reason for the Conservative Party not embracing Twitter. But as of the 2005 election Labour MPs were on average three years older than the average Conservative MP at 52 and 49 respectively. So age alone cannot be a factor.
• 3. Occupation -Background could be a more important factor than age as the Conservative Party has a far higher proportion of MPs from traditional professions such as the law, business and finance as compared with the Labour Party’s greater number of teachers, lecturers and political organisers. This may reflect a greater background of engagement in modern media amongst the Labour Party as compared with the legal and financial careers of Conservative MPs.
• 4. Constituency Impact - But for me, the most redolent reason for why Conservative MPs can blog but not tweet is that whilst they are slowly seeing how blogs can help them to stay in touch with their constituents, they cannot understand Twitter’s benefits. In rural Conservative seats in Cumbria, Sussex and Hampshire there is most likely less frequency of creative and media jobs and less engagement with social media than the urban constituencies like Manchester, London and Birmingham where Labour MPs dominate. The greater number of students, teenagers and 20s-30s working in careers that use social media in Labour constituencies makes Twitter more relevant and usable in campaigning as Boris Johnson has showed as Mayor of London -a constituency with a modern and creative media hub.

These are my main thoughts on this twitter conundrum; but to get to the bottom of this question I am going to conduct a survey of MPs and people involved in political communications who may have a better idea of why there are less Conservatives than Labour MPs on Twitter.  With this in mind I will blog again in a fortnight and outline my findings on the big question:

Where are all the Conservative (MP) Tweeters?