Which party leads online?

Social Media Affairs has just released a report looking at the political social media landscape in the UK (with, ahem, myself being one of the four people contributing introductory remarks about politics and social media).

Any report like this has to deal with all sorts of issues of definition and categorisation but there are some striking broad trends they’ve found.

Liberal Democrat councillors are the keenest bloggers

7% of Liberal Democrat councillors are bloggers (a number boosted significantly by the ALDC MyCouncillor system), compared to 2% of Labour councillors and 1% of Conservative councillors.

This keenness to blog also has a significant impact on the overall flavour of each party’s blogosphere. Amongst all Liberal Democrat bloggers, 55% are councillors, compared with 19% of Conservative bloggers being councillors and 18% of Labour bloggers. A quick look at Lib Dem Blogs most days shows this, with the pieces on national politics interleaved with much more local stories about blocked drains repaired and Council Tax levels set.

London dominates

Overall, one third of political bloggers are located in London, a geographic dominance that is perhaps usually masked somewhat by the fact that our politics is so dominated by events London.

Unfortunately, given London’s dominance it is one of only two regions in the country (the West Midlands being the other) where the Liberal Democrats do not have more bloggers than the Conservatives of Labour. In all the other regions of England, there are more Liberal Democrat bloggers than either of the other parties.

Liberal Democrats punch above their weight online

Of all political bloggers with a political affiliation, the Conservatives lead with 19% (London more than making up for the deficit in other regions) but only just behind are both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, with 16% of all political bloggers each. 7% of political bloggers are Green, 3% SNP and 2% Plaid.

These figures reinforce the point that,  whilst at the top of the traffic scales amongst overtly partisan blogs Conservative supporting blogs can appear to dominate, there is a very broad network of both Liberal Democrat and Labour blogs too.