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Bad feeling for UKIP is being expressed on Twitter

May 29, 2014 — by

There are 15 million Twitter users in the UK, representing 25% of the British public. Maps of Twitter usage show that the majority of users are based around the urban centres. With this in mind, Blurrt set up a campaign to follow the European Elections throughout 22nd May 2014. We collected tweets for the main 7 parties mentioning the European Elections and gathered 43,850 tweets in total during the day. The sample size is much less than the 20+ million people who turned out to vote in the European Elections, however, we wanted to see if the opinions on Twitter reflected the election outcome here in the UK.

The turnout for the European Elections in the UK was 34.19%  and in order of share of the vote, the results were:

27% UKIP

25% Labour

24% Conservatives

7.8% Green Party

6.8% Lib Dems

The picture on Twitter shows that UKIP generated by far the most Twitter activity with 25,500 tweets and the next highest Twitter volume was for Labour with 7750 tweets (see bar graph below for volume and a share of positive, negative and neutral tweets). However the number of negative tweets mentioning UKIP (7,950 tweets) were more than the tweets mentioning Labour altogether  – so clearly a lot of bad feeling for UKIP is being expressed on Twitter.

euroelections-graph-vol-sent-01

It is very interesting to see that the opinions expressed on Twitter did reflect the election outcome here in the UK.

We are going to follow the sentiment expressed for UKIP closely running up to the general election. This is particularly relevant in light of the post-European Election survey carried out by Lord Ashcroft after the polls had closed. It suggested that most people who chose UKIP did so in dissatisfaction with the main political parties. Only half of those who voted UKIP said they expected to do the same at the general election.

Even though Twitter users may not represent UKIP voters as a whole as their core following is based in rural areas, in particular the East of England, it will certainly reflect the sentiment expressed towards UKIP by people residing in more metropolitan areas.