Twitter is now an important online communication channel, also for politicians. All Dutch party leaders have an account. I was curious how active the party leaders actually are with the microblogging tool, what exactly they talk about and for what purpose they tweet. I investigated our system.
Twitter activity of party leaders
The table below lists the party leaders, with the statistics of their Twitter account on September 9, 2013.
Table of Twitter users
What is striking about this table is that the party leaders with the most followers are not necessarily the most active tweeters. Alexander Pechtold, Geert Wilders and Mark Rutte have by far the most followers, but are respectively in 4th, 7th and 8th place when it comes to the number of tweets sent.
Activity in first half of 2013
In the first half of 2013, Diederik Samsom was the most active party leader on Twitter. He sent no less than 1,745 messages in this period. The party leader of the Party for the Animals, Marianne Thieme, follows closely behind. She is also very active on Twitter with 1,680 messages in half a year. jordan bulk sms packagesAfter this, there is a big gap, Henk Krol, number three on this list, sent 837 messages in the first half of 2013.
Volume of most active Dutch faction leaders online monitoring
OBI4wanVolume of less active Dutch faction leaders online monitoring OBI4wanTwitter activity of party
I also wanted to know with what approach these politicians use their Twitter account. For six out of ten active party leaders, their own europe email party is the most mentioned word. You could say that they see Twitter as a channel to promote the party and its positions. The other four politicians use Twitter to implement personalized marketing strategies share positions and to indicate their opinions on various subjects. One of the politicians who does not use Twitter as a promotional channel is Mark Rutte, his account is however not managed by himself, but by the RVD.