Digitas | EU Referendum: Social Insights by Digitas

EU referendum: Social insights by Digitas

PUBLISHED

9 March 2016

Who’s doing all the tweeting about the EU referendum? Where is the majority of activity taking place? Who’s winning the Twitter battle? How did Twitter react to David Cameron’s official announcement of the June 23rd referendum date?

For our latest social media project, we turned our attention to Twitter activity around the EU referendum to discover the answer to these and other questions. We paid particularly close attention to what happened before and after David Cameron’s official announcement on 20th February of the date for the referendum – to track how Twitter activity changed after the announcement.

Where are the tweets coming from?

Percentage of total EU referendum tweets by region

Percentage of EU referendum tweets by region

Twitter sentiment tracking

Twitter sentiment tracking by country

Who is influencing the leave campaign?

David Cameron is most frequently mentioned (typically) as a negative motivator for people supporting the Leave campaign.

Boris Johnson is the next most frequently mentioned as people seem to be supporting him and his stance to leave.

Dan Hannan is the most Retweeted politician supporting the Leave Campaign, making him the 3 most mentioned politician within the Leave Campaign.

Who is influencing the leave campaign?

Overall gender for EU referendum tweeters

The number of female tweeters increased slightly after the referendum announcement of February 20 – up to 29% from 25%.

Female tweeters are most likely to be supportive of the Stay campaign.

Overall gender for EU referendum tweeters

Overall hashtag usage

Likelihood of followers of key publications to follow Leave or Stay campaigns

Tweeters who follow the Stay campaign are most likely to follow The Guardian, The Times and Buzzfeed. Tweeters who follow the Leave campaign are most likely to also follow The Mail Online, BBC News and The Ladbible.

Key publications for each campaign

Methodology

The majority of the data analyzed was between November 1st 2015 and Feb 24th, with 2.5 million tweets occurring during that time frame.

For the purpose of this analysis we excluded “Organisational” tweets, such as those that came from media agencies and publications. Additionally, we only included tweets sent from public Twitter accounts in the UK.

In order to track overall sentiment for all Twitter activity relating to the EU referendum, we looked at a selection of hashtags to determine whether a tweet related to the Stay campaign, the Leave campaign, or was Neutral.

The results are available to download here.

Stuart Aitken

HEAD OF BRAND & CONTENT

As Head of Brand & Content at Digitas UK, Stuart is responsible for seeking out the most compelling narratives from across Digitas‘s UK businesses, identifying marketplace trends for comment and managing the Digitas brand across internal and external channels as well as social media platforms. He is also responsible for planning and providing editorial guidance for key Digitas events such as the annual thought leadership showcase NewFront.