Ed Miliband: Labour’s social media choice

With our regular political commentator away, I was inspired by Hitwise’s look at the search patterns associated with the Labour leadership contest to have a dig around the issue in social media.

Looking at four weeks’ worth of social media up to Friday 21st September, there was, as you’d expect, no shortage of coverage for the Miliband brothers. And large volumes allow for a reasonably accurate picture of the coverage’s sentiment using the automated sentiment analysis available with Cision Social Media.

These results are certainly interesting: were we looking at them last Friday, we would have predicted Ed Miliband just about edging David – exactly what transpired over the weekend.

The timeline is also worth checking out, with the brothers neck and neck when measured by social media volumes until the September 16th Question Time Labour leadership special, when, according to social media volumes, Ed was the star of the show.

Okay, so some of that coverage wasn’t especially complimentary (“creature”, “comfort” and “turtle” were among the leading keywords to emerge from the coverage). But the above analysis is a good fit for the final results – though with Ed Miliband at 4/7 going into the weekend, I’m not sure I would have bet on them.

Still, good to know that the political oracle is still working….