The Twitter Elections

It’s election time and candidates to a seat in the European Parliament are disposing of all means to gear up their support base.
Following the successful example of Barack Obama's bid for the White House, widely credited for its effective use of internet resources, many current and prospective Members of the European Parliament are thus turning to the campaigning possibilities offered by modern information technologies. However, when it comes to the expeditious dimension of the World Wide Web, novelty and originality are big advantages that can make all the difference between those candidates who will actually get to come to Brussels.
Thus, some have now taken their incursion in the online universe a step further, moving forward from the ‘Your MEPs’ site (www.europarl.europa.eu/members.do), personal webpages and blogs, and even their Facebook profiles and supporter pages, to join the new darling of the online social networks: Twitter.

Though readers of this column will certainly be familiar with the Twitter:

Twitter is a micro-blogging social network that allows its users to send and read instantaneous updates, known as tweets. These are short messages of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the users’ profile page and sent to the users (followers) who have subscribed to them. Twitters can be sent via the Twitter website (www.twitter.com), mobile phone (SMS) or external applications.
Though Twitter was founded in 2006, it was only last year, when celebrities such as actor Ashton Kutcher and singer Britney Spears began tweeting, that the site became widely popular. Reports on the number of users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. Yet, recent estimates predict that the site has overtaken MySpace to become the second most used online social network (the first being Facebook). Moreover, in March 2009, the global media giant Nielson Company ranked Twitter as the fastest growing site in the member communities category, with a growth rate of 1382% against Facebook’s 228%.

With such compelling information, it is no wonder that ambitious candidates to the European Parliament want to catch the bandwagon.
According to the website Europatweet (www.europatweets.eu), a website monitoring and cataloguing the current and/or prospective MEPs on twitter, there are currently 76 current or prospective Members of the European Parliament on Twitter.

That being said, twitter is not the holy grail of campaigning, but rather an additional tool which may both help, or hurt MEPs in their quest for re-(s)election. Earlier this year, Graham Watson, leader of the ALDE group drew quite some criticism from the online community when he revealed that it was no-one other than his… wife, who was doing his tweeting.
But Who’s to say that more prominent MEPs don’t capitalise and make good use of the twitter platform? Wim van de Camp  has broken the 1000 follower mark; which in twitter requires some effort, but is entirely possible using the “follow and wait to be followed” technique which most newcomers use.

The added value of tweeting indeed, does not come from the quantity of followers, but from the quality of tweets. Special mention is deserved by the First Vice-President of the European Parliament, Greek EPP-ED MEP Rodi Kratsa, which counts 324 followers on Twitter right now. Though the vice-president is the only active representative of her country; what sets her apart is the quality of her tweets, striking the balance between personal and political; making her (at this point) the most interesting MEP on twitter.
In terms of the political parties; during the last two weeks, the PES has been tweeting the most, with the Greens-EFA in second place, ALDE in third, and the EPP-ED in fourth.

There are already 35 current and prospective MEPs with over 100 followers on Twitter. These are mainly German (8), French (7), British (7) and Dutch (7), but also Irish (3) and Swedish (2).