A Descriptive Analysis of Twitter Followership of the Major Political Parties in Nigeria

Abstract

The role of twitter as one of the most popular social media application for organisations and political parties has been recognized by various scholars. Twitter has been used by parties as a means of sharing information and manifestoes, and also interacting with their followers online. The study was about how the Twitter followership of major political parties in Nigeria has changed since the 2015 elections. The major political parties for this study were the All Progressive Congress, APC and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. An internet research was carried out using the Twitter platforms for the APC and PDP. The research showed that for APC, their growth from 2014 to 2015 was “fairly significant” from 49 followers in 2014 to 244 followers in 2015, while the PDP recorded a “very significant” growth from 5839 in 2014 to 79,516 in 2015. Even though the result showed that the APC recorded a growth on Twitter, they are significantly lagging behind on the follower count as their aggregate Twitter followers are less than the number of voters that make up a polling unit in Nigeria. The surprising fact here is that APC defeated the PDP in the Nigerian presidential election of 2015 by over 3 million votes, yet is trailing the PDP on Twitter, we then have to ask if Nigerian voters have apathy for Twitter? It is recommended that further studies be carried out to ascertain what motivates political parties in Nigeria to use Twitter if as this research has shown there is no correlation between Twitter use and earned votes. Keywords: Twitter, Social Media, Political Parties, APC, PDP, Nigeria.