WATCH ABOVE: From how many times the #abvote hashtag was used leading up to the election to other trends that sparked debate, Kick Point is offering some social media analysis. Emily Mertz reports.
EDMONTON — Between the day the election was called and the day after Albertans voted in a majority NDP government, the #abvote hashtag was used 600,051 times.
Kick Point, an Edmonton digital marketing agency, tracked Alberta election discussion on social media from April 7 on and released the findings on Wednesday.
Kick Point Partner Dana DiTomaso says two things that really stood out to her were the sheer volume of tweets and the spike of discussion right before the election.
“At the beginning, it was about 8,000 people sharing the hashtag and then, by the end, we’re looking at something like 50,000 individual people on election night using the hashtag and having that conversation.”
DiTomaso said their tracking found 56,729 unique authors of #abvote messages and more than 5.3 million people may have seen that hashtag at some point.
Between May 5 and 6, #abvote was used an average of 3,404 times an hour.
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But the Alberta vote hashtag wasn’t the only one that facilitated debate on election issues. Several specific hashtags either sparked or spread discussion on key issues, including #mathishard, #dirkshistory, #buddyyouarebeingsetup, #hopemongering and #pcaahostagecrisis.
READ MORE: Analysis shows Prentice took a beating on Twitter over #mathishard
“PCAA hostage crisis for example… after the five CEOs said ‘oh, you know, better make sure to vote Conservative or else we won’t have any money to give to the Stollery.’ Maybe not the best message and I think for sure that was one of the issues that sank them in the election,” said DiTomaso.
READ MORE: Edmonton business leaders support PC government; NDP dismiss them as ‘PC donors’
She said another trend that got a lot of traction was #lifewithndp.
“That was a really interesting hashtag because that was actually started by a Conservative supporter who wanted people from Manitoba and Saskatchewan to tell their horror stories of living with an NDP government and then there were a few that came out after that, and then it turned and NDP supporters were sharing their success stories of having an NDP government.”
Former Wildrose leader Danielle Smith dubbed this the “clever hashtag election” and credited local author Marty Chan for coming up with many of the trends.
DiTomaso said more people are getting their news and entertainment online, so it only makes sense that’s where the discussion is migrating.
“That’s where your life is.”
She also stressed how the rise of social media discourse has made coverage of events much more two-way.
“A lot of what can come up now does come from social media and it isn’t that sort of top-down broadcasting. It’s shifted now and now the conversation can start with one person making up a funny hashtag.”
READ MORE: Shock, disbelief, joy and dismay: social media reaction to Alberta election
But how much influence do social media trends like these have on election outcomes?
“Really, the people who were talking about it had probably made up their mind,” said DiTomaso. “I think it was the people who weren’t necessarily talking about it but maybe reading about it could have been influenced by the discussions happening.”
For Kick Point, the thrill of the project was in applying the social media monitoring tools currently available to an important event taking place right here at home.
“We wanted to show that this was possible because a lot of people don’t know that you can track every single mention – that it’s entirely possible to grab all this data and do something with it.”
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