I just received this email on my Blogging_Tories twitter account. Somebody in the Liberal war-room has been spending their afternoon following everyone and their brother on twitter.
At the time of this writing, liberaltour on twitter is following 1,963 people while being followed by 532 people.
Perhaps the Liberal strategy is to follow as many people as they can in order to build reciprocal followers. When people follow others on twitter, the followee receives an email indicating that they’re being followed and this gets them to reciprocate with the person who is following them. So, is the Liberal campaign building a following by blasting twitter users email inboxes with follow notices? It appears that they are succeeding somewhat as the number of people following the Liberal tour has also increased this afternoon.
At 2:45pm, liberaltour had just over 1,300 people that they were following, up to 1,600 at 3:15pm, to 1,731 at just before 5pm, and now at 1,932 (5:16pm).
Here are the current standings (as of 5:15pm on September 25 2008) among the five federal party leaders:
| Account | Following | Followers | Ratio | Updates |
| jacklayton | 909 | 920 | 1.01 | 84 |
| pmharper | 854 | 807 | 0.94 | 35 |
| premierministre | 17 | 58 | 3.41 | 28 |
| liberaltour | 1,962 | 532 | 0.27 | 36 |
| tourneeliberal | 0 | 10 | 10.0 | 1 |
| gillesduceppe | 171 | 182 | 1.06 | 69 |
Taking the English and French twitter feeds together for each campaign, the Conservatives have a ratio of 0.99 Following/Followers, the Liberals have a ratio of 0.28, the NDP has 1.01 and the Bloc 1.06.
Most campaigns follow as many people that follow them. However, the Liberals follow more than are followed in the twitter race.
The Liberal campaign should be careful, the folks at twitter advise
A Twitter account may be suspended for a variety of reasons. The most common of which is automated mass following or other types of spammy behavior.
Twitter is a growing social platform that all campaigns are trying to figure out during this campaign and it’s impact on Canadian politics has yet to be seen. If you like, you can follow me on twitter and check out political updates on twitter in real-time at govtweets.ca