The Pirate Movement on Facebook and Twitter – August 2012 | PirateTimes

Posted: August 15, 2012/Under: Creator, Josef Ohlsson Collentine, News/By: Josef Ohlsson Collentine

The Pirate Movement on Facebook and Twitter – August 2012

The Pirate Movement on Facebook and Twitter – August 2012

August 15, 2012 · by Josef Ohlsson Collentine · in

The pirate movement has a total of 536.794 followers on facebook + twitter today! This is a very impressive number and shows that it is indeed a movement that is here to stay. Important to remember is that it’s not only the number of followers that counts but more importantly the level of interaction and impact the posts might have on followers. This is harder to measure than just focusing on the numbers of followers.

Inspired by what Piraten-Statistiken (Pirate’s Statistics) used to do, we will be reporting monthly about facebook and twitter followers for different pirate parties. These numbers become interesting when you start looking at the changes and analyze why there was a decrease or increase. Another aspect that will be interesting to follow is which pirate parties pass others in follower count. Adjusted to the country population it can give an indication about which country is doing good or getting a lot of exposure during that period of time.

The first month it is hard to do comparative analysis since the old data that exists is indeed very old. Therefore, for now, we will only present the two following charts and let you make your own observations. What we can observe is that most pirate parties have a good following on facebook making it an important communication channel.

What would you like to see next month when we will do more number crunching and comparisons? followers/capita, percentage-changes, top-climber, others?
pirate party facebook august followers

pirate party facebook twitter followers

Josef Ohlsson Collentine

About Josef Ohlsson Collentine

I’m a dual citizen (American/Swede) and try to integrate my reflections from a more global perspective if possible. I’m the organizational leader for Pirate Times and work actively to strengthen the pirate movement through this work as well as being the international contact for Piratpartiet (PPSE). Elected board member of PPSE for 2015-2018.
If you would like to ask me something I speak English, Swedish and Spanish. Find me on the links below

 

 


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    • Hey, nice work! ? Another chart would be interesting, and perhaps more telling: these stats compared to the number of inhabitants/voters. Also you missed PPI ? But so far great work of the Pirate Times team! ?


    • Anton Nordenfur

      Good work on the charts! Followers per capita would indeed be interesting. For example Sweden is number two on Facebook followers even though we just have about 9 million inhabitants.

    • How about followers per inhabitants actually on facebook?

    • About the figures shown… is it possible to access to the raw data? I’d love to contribute to the followers/population info.

      BTW. The column named “Pirate Party” has at least 1 error, as the Pirate Party of Catalonia might be just Catalonia, not Spain (Catalunya).

      It doesn’t say country/state, just party ?

    • @jerry @anton indeed an interesting number and will be added next month. PPI is not forgotten, on place #21 fb and #3 twitter

      @jonas not sure if I understand. followers / citizens using facebook ? (if that is what you meant it would be very interesting. I know fb publishes some country stats, will see if I can get to them.)

      @Kenneth need to re-vamp the structure of the data a bit first. Will let you know well ahead of next publish in a month if you still want to help then. You’re right. Will change that. Bear with me, a lot of things to work out to make it smoother ?


    • Anton Nordenfur

      Another idea would have to publish the actual text, not just a picture depicting it. Makes it easier to find a particular party you’re interested in, for example.

    • Obviously we don’t want to become more Germanocentric a movement we already are, but since Land elections are still what it is at for now, and since Germany is bigger than, say, Benelux, or the same size really as the rest of central Europe when it comes to population, it may make sense to track the German Bundesland parties as well I think. If just on a seperate, bottom list. (Or does Piratenstatistiken do that already?)

    • I don’t think they do but it definitely sounds like they should. Give them a shout about it. Not enough global importance to track on Bundesland level, personally I’m more interested in Germany as a whole than individual states.

      But maybe others feel differently?


    • Anton Nordenfur

      I tend to agree with collentine on this. No matter the numbers, it’s not really globally interesting.


    • Klaas Mensaert

      Some remark: you can indeed sum up the numbers of the distict parties, but it does not give you the total (unique) followers. Because one person can follow multiple entities.


    • Anton Nordenfur

      Good point, didn’t think of that.


    • Kenneth

      @Klaas at PP-CAT we listed all the followers of every party in Catalonia and we calculated the “unique followers” as well as the “overlapping” of followers between parties.

      Please @jCollentine, send me the CSV with the list of twitter accounts and fb pages!!


    • Mikael “MMN-o” Nordfeldth

      I’d like to see how many Pirate Parties have accounts on federated social services, instead of the gated communities Facebook and Twitter.

      There should definitely be more encouragement to free oneself from lock-in services within the international pirate movement. In Sweden we’re running an in-development StatusNet (the software) instance at https://freesocial.org/ and want to see more distributed services, preferrably administrated by trusted pirate parties.

      If the pirate movement is centralised around services that are known to act on rather blindly on DMCA takedown-notices et al, we have a lot to worry about.


    • Francisco George (@paco229)

      And why shouldn’t we use twitter followers, they are most trustfull as you can follow and unfollow easier than on FaceBook.

      I, personally, never go back to a FB page to “unlike” it when I suddenly disagree with it.

      PP-ES on Twitter 7417
      PP-CAT on Twitter 4741

    • Mikael, we will reach most voters via twitter and facebook. Most pirate parties are not centralized around those two networks (but rather pads, pub meetings, mailing lists and the likes), but they do use them, since those are the services you can reach potential voters with.

    • Will add Pirate Party from Bosnia-Herzegovina to next one ? Thanks for info!

      @Mikael would love to have an aggegated number of followers via federated services. The easy thing with FB and Twitter is that there are scripts to count followers with and a given place to go in order to see followers. Not sure how to get a good number from federated services that actually tells us something useful :/


    • Kenneth

      PP-CAT twitter administrators point out that it does matter a lot the ammount of people a twitter account follows. I’m not a twitter expert, so I can’t say anything about it, but if you look at major parties in Spain, it looks like our administrators might be right…

      @ppopular follows 1 account for every 53 followers
      @psoe follows 1 account for every 33 followers
      @ciu (sucks in social networks) follows 1 account for every 1,33 followers

      Then, in the pirate arena:

      @piratenpartei follows 1 account for every 7,56 followers
      @partipirate follows 1 account for every 4,26 followers
      @piratepartyuk follows 1 account for every 22,94 followers (excellent!)
      PP-ES 1 out of 4,13
      PP-BR 1 out of 5,58
      PP-SE 1 out of 13,91
      PP-TN 1 out of 113 -> amazing!
      PP-CAT 1 out of 22,9 (excellent!)

      To get some other examples, the white house follows 1 account out of 18052.

      It is a fact that it’s easier to grow in Twitter if you keep on following “meaningless” accounts, however I can’t say why this shouldn’t be done. In PP-CAT we have an “informal party’s account” that keeps on following people, just to get extra difusion, however, this should be taken into account.

      Some Twitter-guru around to bring some light into this point?

      TY!


    • Kenneth

      Ok, I got the answer. It looks like if you start following ppl, many will follow you back, but probably they will not read you at all. Then a way to estimate the impact could be ( Followers – Following ), so, the number of inconditional followers

    • it’s polite to follow back. In this case the ratio doesn’t mean that much though, unless it has been an active strat to gather followers. Most pirate parties wouldn’t just follow a bunch of random accounts to improve their stats, more likely that they are the ones being polite and following back. Another shady strat is to follow a lot of people and then unfollow them to get some to stick…

      Don’t stare yourself blind on numbers even if they are a useful indication at times. What they do is leave an impression of importance though. Quantity vs quality http://collentine.com/gain-500-followers-on-twitter-instantly-quantity-or-quality


    • Kenneth

      In any case, the big point here is the followers / capita and, if possible, followers in your contry interacting with you.

      Otherwise, some parties in tiny countries will get very good rates ’cause many pirate activists like/follow pages and accounts of many other parties.

      In this case, active pirate parties in tiny countries get very good rates due to the fact that there’s up to 200-400 pirates from all around the world following/liking almost every pirate party.

      Also successful parties like the Swedish or the German benefit from this fact, and then language can affect as well. It’s easier for me to follow PP-UK than PP-RU, i.e.

      Then, the only thing we can do is to track down every follower to get a better estimation, however, Twitter and Facebook block this kind of dataminnings.

      As the number of parties and followers is so big, there’s no way to update this data regularly without paying to these social networks, however, we should try to do so at least once. And even with this data, this doesn’t mean that those followers will support you and help you in spreading your news.

      Back in 2010 we gathered this information about every political party running for elections in Catalonia. We found that there was quite big “overlaps” of people following 2 parties with close ideology (i.e. different secessionist parties), that journalists followed every party in the polls and that people following 1 party do also like to follow the opposite party as well (i.e.extreme secessionists & extreme unionists usually follow both extremes).

      We calculated the “unique followers”, in that, PP-CAT was #3 or #4 party in Catalonia.

      So, as you can see, this data is nice and useful, but we need a lot more!!!

      If you want to cooperate in this kind of dataminnings & calculations, please contact me: kenneth -is at- pirata.cat

    • Missed the US state parties. Though, I’m sure the USPP and the state parties have massive overlap, as do most, if not all, of the various country parties.

    • @Ansis Thanks! Will fix that to next one.

      @Brad It’s a list of national parties with the exception of “Catalonia”. Would be too much to add all local chapters in this list. I know it reflects badly particularly on USA who doesn’t have a strong central movement but that will hopefully change in future.

    • Hi!
      1) Will these statistics a monthly?
      2) Why not take into account other social networks?
      G+?
      VK?
      For example: PP-RU in http://vk.com : more than 10,000 supporters!!
      http://vk.com/pp_ru

        • 1. yes. Going to write a new one tonight.

          2. Hard going outside of the two most popular ones for a few reasons. Mostly because there’s no good scripts to get easy updates of +40 parties. The other reason is it’s hard to know which ones to include. Should we count status.net, identi.ca, youtube, flickr, hi5 etc?

          Definitely understand the reasoning and I know VK is much more popular than fb in Russia. Will probably just count fb and twitter for 2-3 more months and then think about how to include others.

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