We’re just a couple of days away from the Spanish general elections and Twitter is boiling up with campaign related messages. People want to have a say in what goes on in their country and they turn Twitter to express their opinions and feelings.
Social networks are starting to play a very important role in political events in Spain, that is why candidates from different parties are actively seeking to get the most profit from their presence in these type of platforms. They apply different strategies that allow them to connect with the people and, hopefully, gain their votes.
Campaign real-time monitoring
At Stratio we have been monitoring the campaign with our real-time data aggregation system, Stratio Sparkta, and with our visualization tool, Stratio Viewer. We use Apache Spark to to process the data and MongoDB to store it.
We have set our focus on the accounts of 20 political parties, 40 candidates and important personalities of the different parties, and 22 campaign related hashtags. All of this has allowed us to have a global perspective of the conversation on Twitter, just as it’s happening. We can know who is being talked about, what’s being said and where. We can even find out what types of content are being shared the most.
So far, the most talked about candidate on Twitter is Mariano Rajoy from PP (Partido Popular) followed closely by Pedro Sánchez from PSOE (Partido Socialista Obrero Español), and the type of content shared the most by users are humorous images. We can also find out in which province is a candidate talked about the most and compare different profiles.
Since Stratio Sparkta aggregates data in real time, we can observe how new events that happen during the campaign affect the conversation on Twitter. For example, a few days ago when the current president, Mariano Rajoy, was hit in the face, his mentions increased.
Whether the social presence of political parties and candidates will bring ROI in terms of votes, we won’t know until Sunday. But what’s clear, is the impact that social networks have on political campaigns, because they help us to get to know audiences better and that way develop more efficient strategies.
