Even though this is one of those topics best handled (to quote Microsoft) with a decent glass of strong Tuscan red, I was still intrigued by a friend’s account of his ongoing reputation management project. He has been working for a member of parliament who, at first sight, is in pretty dire straits. His last Facebook update – a basic, sober social announcement about exam results – had six likes. A total of 3,100 people follow his account, so not a huge number, but still within reasonable boundaries. Six, though: that’s pretty appalling, right?
It turns out that the online and social media habits of our political representatives are easy to trace. I typed “list of UK MPs by Facebook likes” into Bing and the top link was to Statista (pcpro.link/338statista).
Pretty decent for a first-pass estimate. The graphical display is a bit basic, but then I have yet to meet a field of stats in which the largest value was 1.8 million (Boris Johnson) and the smallest was six, and which could put a gap that vast across in an intuitive and readable graphic format.
But that’s a minor issue. What really fascinated me is that a bunch of recent news stories have revealed the level of social media power that rests in so few hands. That no more
