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March 6, 2015

Analytics Hub to “Predict” General Election Outcome

March 6 — BirdSong Analytics (http://www.birdsonganalytics.com/politics/) will provide daily statistics for the key parties on Twitter and Facebook showing who are the winners and losers as the political race heats up.

The daily updates will track all major political parties trending their growth (or loss) of followers day by day and highlighting the most popular tweets each day.

As the election nears, these tables will help identify which parties are best at engaging on social media. It will show who is gaining the most fans and who is losing support.

On Facebook, BirdSong Analytics will rank the major parties by fan base and by engagement. Fan size will help identify the parties with the biggest audience but engagement will show which parties and which messages are resonating most with their fan bases.

BirdSong Analytics will also be tracking the followers of over 450 politicians updating the counts daily in a bid to identify the most and least socially engaged politicians.

Over the course of the next 60-plus days, political pundits, newscasters, party supporters, and voters throughout the UK, will be able to gain an insight into who is leading the social media race, according to Birdsong Analytics.

Jamie Riddell, who founded Birdsong in 2011 with business partner Katherine in frustration at the lack of comprehensive on-demand social media analysis platforms, believes the General Election is the perfect opportunity to put their tool to the test.

“A large percentage of social media users don’t say anything on Twitter so relying on sentiment analysis only provides part of the picture. By tracking the real numbers of fans and engagement, we will have a live barometer of what people are doing as a result of the parties’ social presence.”

“When it comes to something as big as the General Election, we have the perfect landscape in which to assess how voters are thinking and what they are doing in the social media arena, who they’re following – and who they’re not.

“Birdsong’s primary aim has always been to provide data which has tangible benefit as well as delivering insights which satisfies human curiosity. We will see those goals met with this new ‘hub’.”

BirdSong will automatically update the numbers nightly, to ensure the very latest data is available every morning. It hopes to identify which party pulls the greatest engagement, which politicians are seen as more worthy of followers, and equally, which election-bidders fall short in the social-media race.

Jamie added: “We believe this is the first comprehensive tracking hub for the 2015 General Election and it absolutely sets out what Birdsong is capable of.

“We’re looking forward to hearing from parties, pundits, agencies, marketers, journalists and politicians themselves, regarding their views on its analytic capabilities.”

Datanami