In the run up to the 2024 General Elections, IMANI presents PULSE, a fortnightly curated social media-based sentiment analysis report designed to follow the “pulse” of Ghanaians in the run up to the 2024 Election.
The IMANI Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election (PULSE) analysis aims to determine the sentiment on social media, regarding the major political contenders for the election, as well as influential trends and influencers that are shaping social media discourse.
The period under observation for this edition of the report is from the 27th of December 2023 to the 14th of January 2024.
Positive Sentiment
Previously, the positive sentiment of the NPP per 100 social media posts was 9.74%, while that of the NDC was 20%. The results for this period under review has seen NPP have an increase in positive sentiment to around 12%, while that of NDC has fallen significantly to 14.7%, marking a fall of about 5.3% in positive sentiment, which is quite significant.
Negative Sentiment
NPP still leads in terms of negative sentiments and mentions on social media. Proportionally, the percentage of negative mentions of the NPP has reduced from the previous levels of over 90% to around 66% for the NPP for the period under review. This means that generally, the NPP is having more positive sentiment than a month earlier.
However, a deeper view of the data suggests that the number of interactions related to the NDC have also significantly improved in proportion, meaning more positive and negative sentiments expressed with regards to the NDC on social media.
A clear representation of this is the increase in the mentions proportionally, where the NDC gained a 5% increase in social media likes overall. These gains reflected also in the number of social media interactions, as well as the total mentions. NDC gained over 20% more mentions proportionally. Previously, NDC had only 14% of total mentions in the previous period, but this has increased to 38% of all mentions.
It should be noted that the first set of primaries of the NPP in early December last year, led to a huge spike in mentions, indicating that this new trend might reflect a more realistic view of how the social media discussion landscape really is. This can only be validated by more iterative observations over the next couple of months to determine the trend.
NPP had social media reach of 14m while NDC had about 3.1m in December- IMANI
A huge gain for the NDC is the estimated social media reach, where over the period under review, the NDC’s head-to-head estimated social media reach moved from around 3 million to over 18 million, while NPP’s also moved from 14 million to around 25 million.
It is very clear that there are more discussions and reaches made by both parties, but the audience related to the NDC or NDC-related news has increased by sixfold in relation to the previous period under review.
One significant statistic is the non-social media reach, which shows the number of impressions on news items and articles not on social media, but other sources of information on the internet, like news websites, blogs, podcasts and articles.
For non-social media reach for the period, the NPP has almost exactly twice the reach of the NDC, with over 7.4 million impressions as against NDC’s 3.7 million.
Comparatively, the same period earlier the NPP had 4 million as against NDC’s 89,000 non-social media impressions.
Related article:
Advertising value of NPP in December is over $1.14m while that of NDC is a modest $251K plus – IMANI
Per mentions and tags, one of the biggest keywords in positive mentions of the NPP candidate, Dr Bawumia, is the word ‘Possible’. The #itispossible hashtag seems to be the most associated with posts concerning Dr Bawumia. The second most popular hashtag is #DMB2024.
For candidate Mahama, the major hashtags for his mentions include #ChangeIsComing and #24HourEconomy. In future analyses, some of these keywords will be analyzed to determine the sentiments along these keywords as they also determine the feelings of social media users towards major pronouncements and policies.
Source: IMANI Africa