Clegg won the social media buzz war after the leadership debate. But the Conservatives are best placed to exert influence on Twitter. And Labour aren’t at the races.

The media fallout from last week’s leadership debate included much analysis on the ripple effect in social spaces such as Twitter and Facebook. Clegg was a clear winner here as well as in the polls but how much is this “a flash in the pan”? How effective as influencers are the Lib Dems based on their Twitter presence over time? Sorry to prick the Clegg bubble but it looks like the Conservatives are actually better placed, with the Lib Dems a little way behind and Labour playing catch-up.

Brand Republic reported last week that Starcom analysed one million plus online discussions to conclude that Nick Clegg was a clear winner in last week’s televised election debate.

The discussions occurred on UK blogs, websites, forums, and social networks, including Twitter and Facebook. The agency compared positive and negative discussions 24 hours prior to the broadcast as well as immediately prior to, during and post the debate.

Nick Clegg achieved the greatest increase in positive discussions – up 93%. Negative discussion rose 20%.

Gordon Brown arguably did well with a 74% a increase in positive discussion, albeit tempered considerably by a 54% increase in negative discussions.

Conservative supporters would presumably be disappointed with the fact that David Cameron had a 44% increase in both positive and negative opinion.

But let’s not get carried away with the immediate effect of the debate. Social media is a great barometer on public opinion, sure, but it is also an influencer itself. I thought I’d take a look at how well placed the respective parties are placed in terms of how well they are using Twitter and who is exerting the most influence.

For a fair comparison I went to the home pages of the official websites of the three parties to establish which Twitter account they recommend an interested visitor should follow. I then compared these accounts in one of the better Twitter tracker sites: Klout. In their own words:

“Klout allows you to track the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. We collect data about the content you create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of your network. From there, we analyze the data to find indicators of influence and then provide you with innovative tools to interact with and interpret the data.”

Klout then allocates a K-score, the higher the K-score the more influence the Twitter account is having. The results are clear:

Conservatives (@Conservatives) 38
Liberal Democrats (@libdems) 31
Labour (@UKLabour) 21

This is more enlightening then a crude comparison of number of followers for example. The amount of followers obviously helps in terms of influence. The Conservatives do have over 27,000 followers which is nearly twice as much as Labour and the Lib Dems. But Labour actually have pretty much the same amount of followers (14,700) as the Lib Dems (14,676) but in terms of how they are using Twitter and how people are responding they trail quite badly as the above K-scores show. The Klout summaries are also telling.

Labour is a casual. The advice given by Klout could well be taken more widely by Brown and his party: “you have succeeded in building a strong audience but need to engage.”

Lib Dems is a connector. Again the summary echoes much current sentiment on Clegg and the LibDems: “Your taste and opinion is respected and your judgement is trusted”

Conservatives, however, stand tall as they are seen as a persona. Klout state that this means they “have built a personal brand around your identity…not just about having a ton of followers…make no mistake about it, when you (Conservatives) talk people listen.”

Clegg maybe getting all the buzz at the moment but a deeper look at who is best placed to use social media to exert influence shows that the Conservatives are a clear winner.

The wider point, however, is that none of the parties are really in that strong a position on Twitter compared to, say, Barack Obama (K-score 100) or even SarahBrown10 who has over 1.1 million followers and a K-score of 58. The official Labour Twitter account would have done well to have learnt a few lessons from Gordon’s better half.