Online buzz around the Canadian election is looking like a unilingual debate–with French-language posts accounting for only about 2% of election-related messages on Twitter.
The Canadian Press analysis, done with digital public affairs strategist Mark Blevis, suggests close to 30,000 political messages have flashed around the microblogging site since the campaign began.
The analysis uses a software program called Sysomos that parses Twitter for messages tagged as being related to the election. About 4.5 million Canadians use Twitter, though it’s not clear how many francophones currently use Twitter. The service launched in English in 2006 and rolled out a French version in 2009.
One interative marketing blog based in Quebec says the ratio of users in that province is about 5% of the population, significantly lower than the national average of 13.5%. Quebec is well above the national average, however, when it comes to using Facebook.
Francophone tweeters also appear to be having different conversations than their anglophone peers when it comes to the election.
While English-language messages, so far, have most often been about coalitions and taxes, francophones have been more likely to discuss the deficit and families.
The style of conversation has also been different in French.
While the majority of English messages are people resending links to published content or other people’s thoughts, francophones are engaging in more free-flowing conversation.
About 22% of French messages are replies to other people’s musings, compared to 13% in the rest of Canada.
Blevis isn’t very surprised by the English-French cultural gap.
“We’re going to expect to see some differences–especially since the majority of Quebec is represented by the Bloc Quebecois, so there is going to be different issues,” said Blevis.
Among those tweeting is Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe.
His Twitter account, which is maintained by a BQ team, has been responding to queries, in addition to sending out press releases.
Duceppe even used Twitter earlier this week to weigh into the coalition debate, saying his talks with Stephen Harper in 2004 had been about forming one.
In the English-speaking world, Twitter got a major boost in the 2008 U.S. presidential election when Barack Obama adopted the service as part of his election strategy.
The arrival of big francophone names on the site will help build the volume of French-language conversation, Blevis said. A number of prominent Quebec politicians and pundits have just joined the network in recent months.
“It really needs somebody of status to kickstart some adoption,” he said.
French users have been trying to carve out their own space in the election debate, said Blevis, who noted that they’ve been creating their own tags to identify French messages.
The Canadian election analysis, which is being conducted for The Canadian Press throughout the federal campaign, only measures messages stamped with hashtags that allow Twitter users to identify their tweets as election-related, including #cdnpoli, #elxn41, #cv11 #cdescom and #fed2011.
