Recently Twitter announced (as reported in Mediabistro) that 100% of elected US Senators and 90% of Representatives were using Twitter, and mapped the country to show electorate coverage by state.
I track the use of Twitter by Australian federal politicians through my Australians Politicians on Twitter Google spreadsheet (about 66% use the service), and decided to similarly map Twitter use across Australian electorates and states.
I found there are some major holes in Twitter use outside of metropolitan areas, as shown in the map below by electorate.
Note that my data is current as at 21 January 2013.
Australian House of Representatives Twitter users by electorate
I’ve scaled the map below by number of tweets to show the level of activity by member.
Australian parliamentary Twitter users by state (Senate & Reps)
At least by state, every jurisdiction has at least a few federal twitter users, and the maps below take in Senators as well as Representatives, giving a total level of tweeting by elected members by state and territory.
Federal parliamentary tweeters by state/territory by tweets
Click on the map to see the total tweets by all elected members in a state or territory.
Federal parliamentary tweeters by state/territory by followers
Again the picture is a little different by followers, due to the impact of Kevin Rudd (Queensland) and Julia Gillard (Victoria), the most followed Australian politicians.
More to come…
I am in the process of mapping tweeting levels by political party and identifying the ‘tigers’ who are using the service very actively, compared to other politicians.
I am also mapping government agencies in a similar way – crosschecking around 840 tweeting federal, state/territory and local governments to find out who are the most active and most followed tweeters.
Keep an eye on my blog for more of this information over the next few weeks.
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