IMANI Africa in its latest assessment of the social media engagements of the two leading political parties in Ghana concluded that head-to-head, the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) in December had a social media reach of about 14 million, while the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had about 3.1 million.
The social media interactions which result from comments and posts showed NPP having 266,000 interactions against NDC’s 192,000 plus interactions, the IMANI Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election analysis (PULSE), said.
It still shows that people are talking more about NPP than the NDC, it stressed, adding that outside social media on traditional web based sources like websites, it was overwhelmingly clear that about 90% of content was about NPP.
“For every post made on social media that tagged Bawumia or NPP, only 9.74% of these were positive in nature. For every post on social media that tagged Mahama or NDC, about 20% were positive in nature. From the period analyzed, there were 4x the number of tags for NPP or Bawumia than posts that tagged NDC or Mahama,” the report further revealed.
“A new metric being introduced for analysis is Advertising Value Equivalent. This shows us how much the value of the social media reach will be if the content was being paid for, which will also allow us to value the social media presence of both candidates and parties.
“For the month of December, the Advertising Value Equivalent for the NPP is just over $1.14 Million, while that of NDC is a modest $251K plus,” the report also stressed.
Lead Researcher at IMANI Africa, Selorm Branttie said “So, for those interested, there was a disparately huge difference in the total media engagement on social media between NPP and NDC.”
Commenting on these findings, Vice President of IMANI Africa, Kofi Bentil, stated on his Facebook page that “Facts are sacred. Start work.”