The Australian election debate: a Twitter event

The televised debate between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott increase the amount of Australian election tweets by a factor of about 19. The event, which started at 6:30pm on Sunday 11th August, saw over 50,000 tweets while it was in progress.

As mentioned in my previous post, I collected a lot of tweets during the Australian election debate between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott. Although I had expected an increase in the amount of tweets, I didn't expect such a massive increase.

The massive increase in volume of Australian election tweets is shown in the chart above. The chart shows the day of the debate, plus the two preceding days for comparison. Between 6pm and 8pm on the night of the debate, I collected a massive 71,263 Australian election tweets. The same hours on the previous night saw only 3,755 tweets sent - meaning that the debate increased the volume by about 19 times.

A key driver of this engagement was clearly the interactive elements encouraged by the media networks. Most networks, including the ABC, Channel Nine and Channel Ten had their own unique hashtags to allow their viewers to tweet their votes. This form of engagement, straddling both traditional and new media, was clearly effective for the broadcasters.