Young people's health and education most searched terms during election campaign
With the leaders of the main political parties determined to make this a presidential style contest about personality and focused predominantly on the UK's pending negotiations with Brussels, many organisations looking to engage candidates in the campaign on a whole host of issues might be feeling a little lost as to where to go and who, out of the thousands of Parliamentary Candidates might be interested in their issues and campaigns.
While certain free to use services like TheyWorkForYou might help identify Members of Parliament who could be interested or even sympathetic to issues once elected, knowing who has done or said what before being elected is incredibly difficult to gauge without an almost impossibly time consuming hunt to identify and trawl through thousands of twitter accounts and personal websites. Social media is allowing would-be politicians to directly engage with millions en masse for the first time, but for many this digital downpour is simply overwhelming and consequently largely ignored.
To help manage this potentially overwhelming flow of information, PoliMonitor launched a free to use #GE2017 monitoring and engagement feature to our existing service. Since the candidates were finalised earlier this month, we've been hoovering up all the tweets by the 2,000 Parliamentary Candidates who use Twitter and allowing users to search and receive a free daily email alert if terms of interest are mentioned during the campaign. So far, terms related to young people's health and education are among the top searches on the site. This feature not only allows hundreds of individuals, companies and charities to know who's talking about them, but also enables them to directly engage these would-be MPs by celebrating supportive candidates, or alternatively challenging those who are yet to pledge to take action if elected.
While Brexit will undoubtedly continue to feature prominently as we enter the final furlong in this campaign, millions of people are still interested in where the thousands of candidates stand on many hundreds of other important issues. I hope PoliMonitor can help foster the type of richer, detailed discussion which this new technology has the potential to deliver.