Unless you were under a cloud of volcanic ash (oh, wait…), you’ll have known that last night saw the UK’s first ever leaders’ debate on ITV. The event, despite an Icelandic volcano’s best efforts, has dominated the news agenda across all media platforms for the last week.
Online opinion tracker Tweetminster provided consistently interesting facts throughout proceedings and in the aftermath with regards to interest in the debate on Twitter. Throughout the debate, a staggering 35,483 people tweeted 184,396 times, with an average frequency of 29.06 tweets per second.
To put that into some form of context, that’s fifteen times more tweets than were seen for #askthechancellors and almost triple the volume of tweets posted during BNP leader Nick Griffin’s infamous appearance on Question Time – both of which saw significant surges in interest themselves.
Admittedly, in the context of the entire UK population those figures seem less impressive. However, they still do add to the belief that – in social media circles – the appetite for political consumption is there.
What these debates and the interest around them have demonstrated, is that while social media isn’t a direct replacement for other media, it’s a hugely engaging complement to other platforms.
The observations provided on Twitter, even though much of it was superficially commenting on the state of the leaders’ make up or what they were scribbling on their notes, made the leaders’ debates incredibly exciting.
The TV debate on its own may have made for relentlessly dull viewing (BBC Parliament, anyone?), but Twitter added a whole new dimension, providing an outlet for discussion and amusing insight not just from your average Joe, but from people in power, too. Throughout the debate I was enlightened of the real-time thoughts of Alistair Campbell, the Evening Standard’s deputy political editor Paul Waugh and MPs John Prescott and William Hague.
What other aspect of the media could offer such close insight?
The leaders’ debate was part of a continuing acceptance that engagement in politics means more than simply voting at a ballot box. People are interested and engaged, but just in increasingly complex ways, including social media.
This interest in the leaders’ debates, be it superficial or not, can only be seen as a positive. Millions of people tuned in to the debate on TV and thousands of those cared enough to express some form of opinion. In the world of low voter-turnouts and sentiment for politicians being at its lowest ebb, that can only be a good thing.
