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One of the benefits to archiving all the tweets by MPs is the ability to generate interesting statistics. Politwitter has many stats and trends available on the site, but I thought I would manualy generate some additional stats. All of the below stats are based on all the tweets federal MPs have made since May 2009.

What becomes apparent from these stats is that Denis Coderre is the king of political twitter in Canada.

If you have an ideas of other stats I could create please let me know!

Most Tweets

user	total
DenisCoderre	6315
mpjamesmoore	1893
ujjaldosanjh	1458
brownbarrie	1371
TonyClement_MP	1132
oliviachow	1103
WildRoseMPBlake	1054
Carolyn_Bennett	1012
MichelleSimson	954
MinJK	769

Most @replies

user	total
DenisCoderre	2668
WoodworthMP	292
mpjamesmoore	193
ujjaldosanjh	178
TonyClement_MP	135
Carolyn_Bennett	123
darylkramp	123
MinJK	93
stanton_brucemp	80
oliviachow	80

Most retweets

user	total
DenisCoderre	351
keithmartinmp	163
oliviachow	115
MinJK	97
mpjamesmoore	95
brownbarrie	60
mplauriehawn	48
GlennThibeault	45
Carolyn_Bennett	35
LibbyDavies	29

Tweets the most links

user	total
DenisCoderre	629
oliviachow	623
mpjamesmoore	568
GlennThibeault	359
Siksay	308
jacklayton	299
HedyFry	268
MinJK	264
brownbarrie	253
keithmartinmp	222

Most hashtag use

user	total
DenisCoderre	1288
oliviachow	691
ujjaldosanjh	643
LibbyDavies	479
Carolyn_Bennett	430
MichelleSimson	363
TonyClement_MP	309
peterbraid	242
RickDykstra	212
WildRoseMPBlake	207

Replies to other MPs

user	total
oliviachow	13
MichelleSimson	6
ujjaldosanjh	6
mpjamesmoore	5
MinJK	3
joycemurray	2
MPRubyDhalla	2
WildRoseMPBlake	2
DenisCoderre	2
HedyFry	2

Most words tweeted

user	total
DenisCoderre	79857
mpjamesmoore	28564
brownbarrie	24924
ujjaldosanjh	21748
WildRoseMPBlake	19806
TonyClement_MP	19767
Carolyn_Bennett	18634
MichelleSimson	18627
oliviachow	18288
MinJK	14429

Combined party totals

party	total
liberal	15314
conservative	11480
ndp	6243
bloc	393

Tweets by day of week

day	total
wednesday	5501
thursday	5424
tueday	5205
friday	4894
monday	4799
saturday	4000
sunday	3610

The homepage of Politwitter features a pie chart on the right side showing the current months partisan indexed tweets. It’s been in the back of my mind that for many months the Liberals have been dominating this pie chart, so I thought I would investigate further.

The pie chart not only shows Federal Liberal MPs but also other liberal tweeters indexed by Politwitter and liberal hashtags. In this metric Liberals are dominating all the other parties combined.

If the chart is changed to only show Liberal MPs, the results are similar. Liberal MPs are tweeting much more than Conservatives. This is not something new, this is a trend that started at the beginning of 2010.

Individual Liberal MPs are also outpacing their rivals, the most active tweeter is Liberal MP Denis Coderre and a total 0f 5 Liberal are in the top 10 Tweeters for 2010, compared to 4 Tories and 1 NDP.

Liberals have also stepped up their game with hashtags, the conservative #ROFT hashtag used to dominate the stats as the most used partisan tag, but over this summer #LPC has overtaken it. The liberal Express hashtag has also been used a lot #lpcx.

There are 2 more Conservative MPs on Twitter than Liberals, but the liberals have a higher percentage of their MPs using Twitter.

party	MPs with Twitter	total MPs	percentage
Conservative	39	145	%27
Liberal	37	80	%46
Ndp	21	38	%55
Bloc	9	50	%18

Liberal MPs also have more total combined followers at 145,827 compared to the Conservatives 120,696. In 2009 the Conservatives were ahead, but again the Liberals have steamed ahead in 2010. Also noteworthy that Liberal MP Justin Trudeau has more followers than party leader Gilles Duceppe and is catching up to Jack Layton.

Liberals are also ahead in other social media, 34 Liberal MPs are on Facebook compared to 30 Conservatives. 14 Liberals on Flickr, 8 Conservatives. 20 liberals on YouTube, 18 Conservatives.

Liberal MPs also post more pictures to twitter and Flickr than Conservatives, but they do lag behind the Conservatives a bit in posting YouTube videos. Liberals also have a higher combined “Social Media Score”. Liberals also have more candidates and Riding associations on Twitter.

Is this all just a coincidence or are the Liberals making a concerted effort to bolster their Twitter & social media presence and usage?

Politwitter’s main focus is tracking Twitter, so some of the stats on facebook, youtube & flickr usage might not be up-to-date.

I just realised that Politwitter.ca passed its 1 year anniversary last week! I haven't had much time recently to add new features to the site, but it has continued to operate well and there were several large backend tweaks.

I've been pretty happy with how well the site has done, I didn't know what to expect when I started a year ago. Overall I think the amount of traffic the site gets is lower than I had hoped, with the exception of the crazy spikes in traffic the site gets when there are political events like provincial elections and party conventions. It's been super cool that the site has caught the eye of the media, being featured in numerous articles, magazine article, and several radio stations. I've also received many emails from people in the press & members of parliament. Unfortunately in the web world none of that really translates into much of an increase of site traffic. This I pretty much knew already from my years of experience promoting other sites, much more important is search engine optimization which was a primary focus from day one. The majority of new traffic Politwitter gets is from search engines, over the last year Politwitter has ranked very well in anything to do with Canadian political twitter.

I also tried a news release for the first time with Politwitter, there was no noticeable boost in traffic as a result of that, and one can't tell if any of the press attention came from that. I think the money is better spent on Google ads than a press release...

In my modest opinion Politwitter is the best and most fully featured national political twitter aggregator (see others here), with maybe the exception of the newly redesigned tweetminster.co.uk in the UK. But they have venture capital money with a staff of developers! Politwitter has no funding and has cost me lots of my own time & money.

Every month I track a bunch of variables comparing Politwitter to other political twitter sites to see how it compares. Here is one stat using alexa which is not very accurate to judge the actual amount of traffic a site gets but is somewhat useful to compare sites. Politwitter is only beaten by the well funded Tweetminister.

While we're on the subject of stats here are some more, because I like stats!

• Unique visitors (approx): 70,000
• Pageviews (approx): 300,000
• Total Indexed tweets: 520,677
• Total Indexed tweets by MPs: 22,591
• Total Indexed tweets by MLAs: 17,009
• Politwitter Widget Views: 469,792
• MP videos indexed: 557
• Twitter pictures indexed: 5,534
• People who have logged into Politwitter: 3,045
• Used the Politwitter follow feature: 4,845
• Used the Politwitrter search: 25,374
• Posted tweet from Politwitter: 2,128
• Invitations sent to MPs: 805
• People using the Politwitter Facebook app: 6
• Donations to site: $0
• Number of MPs on Twitter before Politwitter launched: 39
• Number of MPs on Twitter currently (May 2010): 99

So the number of MPs using twitter has more than doubled since this time last year, I like to think that Politwitter might have played a small part in that. The next year will be interesting, because I will be able to compare all the stats against the previous year, to see the amount of tweeting is increasing.

It has been fun working on the site, that's the only reason it exists, because of my personal interest. A site like this doesn't make money and there are no ads on the site. Even if i plastered the site with ads it wouldn't be worth it. But the site does take a lot of time to develop and maintain. I am accepting donations to help fund further development and upkeep of the site, but no one has donated in the past year :(

If you ever have any ideas about how to improve the site or a feature or statistic too ad, please let me know!

For those who frequently use Politwitter daily you have no doubt come across the red error message saying "Twitter rate limit reached". This refers to the limit of request the site can make to Twitter to fetch data in a given time period. The frequency of this problem has increased with the increase of traffic to the site, the limit is reached almost all day.

This error was would only occur on pages that don't load cached/archived tweets, but a solution was needed. So I've been working on a new backend method of fetching the majority of the tweets. With this new method Twitter has granted increased access to the site so their should be no problem with limits.

The new update method is also faster! Politwitter will now show new tweets in mere milliseconds after they are posted to Twitter. With any large change like this, problems could popup. So please let me know if you notice anything missing or out of place.

How do Canadian politicians on Twitter compare to other countries? As some of you may know other countries have national Twitter sites like politwitter that connect politicians with people. Tweetcongress in the US, Tweetminister in the UK and TweetMP in Austrailia are the most notable. Since these sites all started before politwitter and in the case of Tweetcongress and Tweetminsiter have large followings and have received a fair amount of press, I expected that these countries would have a fairly high participation rate amongst politicians.

So I decided to check the numbers and see how Canada compares. None of the other sites display their totals out in the open like Politwitter does, but after contacting each of the sites I have the current totals and they surprised me. Canada is actually doing fairly well, we have the 3rd most MPs on twitter but we are 2nd for the percentage of MPs. Since each country has a different amount of elected representatives looking at the percentage is most useful I think. So we are not that far behind the US, and they just went through a big election and Tweetcongress recieved a lot of mainstream press.

country	site	MPs with Twitter	total MPs	percentage
USA	Tweetcongress.org	133	435	30%
Canada	PoliTwitter.ca	68	308	22%
UK	TweetMinister.co.uk	79	646	12%
Australia	TweetMP.org.au	15	150	10%

One of Politwitter's main goals is to get more MPs to start Twittering, and the site provides several tools to assist in this. Of course there is no way of measuring when an MP joins Twitter if Politwitter had any role in that. But since Politwitter launched 23 new MPs have joined Twitter. I have been active in contacting all the parties, each MP and Senator to encourage them to utilize Twitter. I think Canada can easily double the total number of MPs on Twitter. You can help by encouraging your Local MP to start Tweeting if he or she hasn't already. You can use the “MPs without Twitter” page to help find your MP and send emails to them.

One other related topic I wanted to mention is the participation of Canadians in political Twittering seems to be increasing, more people are Tweeting their MPs, using political hashtags and so on. Below is a chart showing the amount of people actively participating each month. The numbers are somewhat skewed since over this time span many new hashtags and MPs have been added increasing the ways someone can be counted as a participant. I will update this chart at the end of the year. (Note for someone to be counted they have to make at least 2 tweets that are indexed by politwitter in that month)

Well another month passes by, the 4th full month Politwitter has been running and it was the busiest month yet! The daily visitors to the site rose sharply and now maintains a nice average. Back in July there was several spikes but it would go down after. In august the site received over 6,000 unique visitors and 30,000 page views.


I am also excited that many visitors are starting to use the user functions of the site, people are logging-in and using Politwitter as their Twitter client. This was always one of my goals.


More people are using the mobile version of the site as well, so I did some work on the mobile site this month to clean it up and make it even faster loading. The politwitter widget is also slowly getting used, the widget had 8,100 views in August plus 50,000 more from Canadaka.net.

August was also a busy tweeting month, with the NDP Convention and 6 new MPs joining Twitter! It was a busy month for Liberal Tweeters, they soared ahead of the Conservatives in number of Tweets.


With the possibility of an election looming this fall, I hope and expect visitors to keep rising, summer is usually slow for politics. I am continually improving the site and adding features, and if an election is called expect a bunch of election content!

I want to give a big thanks to everyone who has blogged or tweeted about the site. The more exposure the site gets, the more pressure on MPs to start Tweeting! Another shoutout to those who helped me track down some bugs this month and anyone who has offered feedback and suggestions!
6zpus5wknx

59 federal MPs have now joined Twitter. You can see an interactive timeline of when MPs joined here. Hopefully many more will join, I think many will this fall, especially if an election is called.

But how are MPs using Twitter and are they using it in a way that makes politics and government more accountable or accesable?

Here are some observations

• Some politicians only use Twitter as a one-way communication to promote themselfs, only posting news updates and events
• Others participate in conversation with Canadians and with other MPs. But many MPs Twitter accounts are rarely updated, they seem to only update during an election.
• MPs like to promote local events in their community
• Tweeting MPs add a personal touch to politics, which could help to combat voter apathy
• As far as we know MPs who tweet are not put through any filter like the PMO and tweets cannot be completely deleted. So might an MPs tweet something they shouldn't?
• in the USA, many Government departments have Twitter and provide updates on programs and spending. No Canadian government departments seem to use twitter, but some provincial Ontario ministries are tweeting.
• Twitter updates are often the first source for news, before blogs, news media and TV. MPs or observers often tweet from their mobile phones.

Below are some statistics I've compiled using Politwitter that show how often MPs are using Twitter as a 2-way conversation. The numbers show that for the most part they are not replying to Canadians or to other MPs. Hopefully this will change as MPs start to grasp the potential of Twitter and learn the ropes.
The below stats are compiled from all the tweets since about mid May 2009.

MP @replies Total: 252 MP replies ujjaldosanjh 58 MinJK 50 cherylgallant 28 oliviachow 27 mpjamesmoore 18 HedyFry 15 TeamMHF 14 dondavies 6 GillesDuceppe 5 LibbyDavies 5

MP @replies to other MPs Total: 12 MP replies oliviachow 5 MinJK 3 mpjamesmoore 2 HedyFry 1 ujjaldosanjh 1

I created a new feature called "Politician Social Media Score" which grades how each MP is using social media like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and flickr. This new feature is still a work-in-progress as I will be adding additional criteria and tweaking the point values. But its interesting to see which MPs are using new social media the most.

I have had fun creating this site over the last 3+ months, I was forced to think of ways around problems I hadn't dealt with before. And most rewarding is the great response from the Canadian twitter community I have received. A big thanks to all of those who offered feedback, tweeted about the site or posted a link on their blog.

I have spent a great deal of time improving the site and adding features, I think it's the best national Twitter mashup out there. But I am a bit disappointed in the amount of traffic a site like this receives. It spikes a lot when there is a political event, like you would expect, but a simple site like www.canadianblogosphere.ca gets more daily visitors. Since mid July the traffic has started to pickup and now there are usually around 20 people on the site at any given time during the day and a couple hundred unique visitors daily. It will be interesting to see what happens when fall arrives or an election is called.

Some observations over the last 3 months are that more people seem to be using political hashtags in their tweets, a result of politwitter? Possibly in May I created a bunch of new hashtags and started promoting them, several have caught on, including #cdnpoli which is now the most used political tag. Another observation is that when the site started the Conservative tweeters were way ahead of Liberal or NDP tweeters with regards to hash tag organization, total tweets and MP’s on Twitter. Possibly as a result of the stats provided by politwitter the Liberal Tweeters have picked up their game and are now matching or beating the Conservatives on twitter.

It still seems that most visitors aren’t using the full potential of politwitter, maybe because they don’t know what it can do? So I created an introduction video last month and a detailed help page yesterday. I track various actions on the site to see how often they are used, lots of the sites features are not used as much as I had hoped. Maybe people don't know they can use the site to post Tweets or they use a desktop application or mobile app to do their tweeting. Some of the tracked items are new or I wasn't tracking them before, that's why the numbers are 0.

I think most of the bugs and a lot of the performance issues have been ironed out and I'm pretty happy with all the features. But like most projects, every time I finish something I think of 5 new things I could do and add them to "the list". So I have many more things planned for the future and I'm open to suggestions.

I also decided to move the Blog from Facebook to the site, I created a really simple blog system. I am also re-considering using Facebook as the feedback discussion forum. It's not being used much and I think the problem with it is Facebook doesn't send notifications of any kind when there is a new discussion or a reply. So people never check back after joining. Before I created the Facebook page I looked at some of the feedback apps like Uservoice, none were perfect and they all charged a monthly fee for the good features. But it’s something I am going to re-consider. I could also make a sub-forum on CKA Canadian Forums for feedback. I was just trying to avoid people the hassle of having to register on a site to post, I figured most people already had facebook.

I've been away from home for the last 3 days so I hadn't been keeping up with twitter, but tonight I noticed a tweet David Akin made about TweetCommons.com another new Canadian political twitter site. I have to say it angers me a bit to see someone else take my idea somewhat, but I do thrive under competition. It gives me more incentive to make my site clearly the best. It is also a bit surprising since I've found there isn't a large amount of web traffic and certainly no commercial reason to a site like this, the audience isn't large enough. I don't plan to make money from politwitter, its for personal interest.

Not to put down this new site but its no where near as complex to create as politwitter. What they are doing is fairly simple and its just a facade site. Where as politwitter is a full twitter client with additional features over twitter.com. politwitter is fairly complex in grabbing political tweets from many sources and keeping them in an internal database allowing fast pageloads even if twitter.com is down. Also allowing real-time tweet updates and the ability to view tweets in a variety of forms. politwiter also tracks statistics, popular links, tweeted pictures and more.

The scope of the 2 sites is also much different, this new site only deals with federal MPs, where as politwitter includes MPs from Federal and provincial along with any regular Canadian talking about politics.

There are a couple things on this new site that I like and are not currently on politwitter.ca, but that will soon change! Borrow from the borrowers ;) I like when you view a specific MP's page you can see the @reply's directed to that MP. I think I will also add some more contact details for each MP on politwitter like they have done. I'm not sure if this data is available to the public somewhere on a government website, or if it was added by hand. If anyone knows that would be helpful. They also seem to be moving in the direction of showing which riding an MP is from, currently politwitter only shows the province. I'm not sure if its worth the manual data entry for that, but its something I might consider doing.

Let the games begin, heh
I will be spending some time next week doing updates to the site, I haven't had time lately. If anyone ever wants to help out with the development or running of politwitter please let me know, i'm open to help!

And as always, please let me know any suggestions!

politwitter was getting a good amount of users yesterday during the BC election coverage. BC political Twitter

over 100 users online constantly for an hour or 2, and there was a short period where it spiked to over 600 users. THEN twitter decided to die and stop updating their API or any search results. So even on twitter.com and 3rd part apps people couldn't get updates on hash tags or search terms. Great timing! It was down for about an hour, politwitter was still functional, just no updates for that hour.

The heavy load on the site made it slow down a lot during times and froze the site completely when that 600+ users all came at once. So I have much work to do improving the systems to handle heavy loads. But this was a good test, need these real world tests to find these things out. I found a couple bugs I was able to fix because of this. One being the site was "rate limited" by twitter even though i'm whitelisted I excedded the 20,0000 requests per hour. So i had to add checks in the code for that, and I added a counter like Tweetdeck has, to the bottom of the page. The big bug I found is that when a user has “auto-update” enabled its possible for them to miss a tweet, if the tweet interval is really fast, like it was during the election evening. So I need to resolve that.

Now I am starting to add Nova Scotia politicians to the sites database, since that’s the next election. If you know any provincial NS candidates with twitter, please submit them to politwitter.ca here is what i've found so far Nova Scotia MLA's on Twitter WAY less than BC, you Nova Scotians don't seem to be as 'hip' with teh internets.