New insights from media intelligence company Meltwater has found that interest in the election campaigning is waning, with comparison of news coverage and social media telling very different stories about party preference and sentiment.
Meltwater’s real time insights in its Election Centre Custom Dashboard show that at the halfway mark of this Election campaign, Australians are steadily posting less on social media about the Election, with voter discussion down 29 per cent this week across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and Tik Tok.
The Dashboard has also revealed there is a stark contrast in sentiment between news media coverage and social media discussion about the Election.
Social media mentions about the Liberal Party are more negative compared to those about Labor, while news media shows the reverse, with 36 per cent of coverage tending to be negative towards Labor, and 25 per cent negative towards the Liberals.
Meltwater’s tracking also found that the trending topics across major social networks this week included Labor’s cashless welfare scheme (labelled “mediscare” in over 4 thousand social media posts), the proposed establishment of a federal anti-corruption commission (18k posts) and the perceived influence of the “morally vagrant Murdoch press” on election outcomes (3.8k posts).
The Election Centre Custom Dashboard delivers real-time insights using its media intelligence platform to scan the largest global media database covering both news and social media coverage.
The dashboard captures trending themes, political share of voice, monitor sentiment, and party reputation, as well as tracking key phrase momentum around election issues and showing a heatmap of worldwide and Australian coverage.
Georgina Bitcon, enterprise director at Meltwater said: “This year’s election is sure to be a contentious one. With upsets in the budget announcement and delays in setting the date, we have already seen a flood of insights across global news and social media.”
“Our custom solutions engineers have been hard at work on this interactive dashboard to provide businesses and all Australians with a source of truth for trending election deciders, allowing them to track who is leading the pack in terms of share-of-voice, social chatter, and public sentiment.”
Meltwater’s Election Centre is a custom solution built by the Meltwater Enterprise Solutions team. Meltwater’s engineers work with Australia’s leading organisations to craft custom built data visualisations, overlaying Meltwater’s news and social media monitoring intelligence with key business insights and unifying multiple sources of data and metrics to create a single and complete visual dashboard. Locally Macquarie University is one of the market leading users of Meltwater custom solutions, while internationally, Macy’s, Asana and Kia have deployed Meltwater’s custom solutions.
