The most discussed topic on Twitter at the last EP plenary of October was the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. More than two hundred MEPs posted over a thousand tweets including the hashtag #CETA or #StopCETA.
The most active parliamentarians on CETA were two Greens, Jan Philipp Albrecht (@janalbrecht) and Michel Reimon (@michelreimon) and GUE/NGL’s Marie Christine Vergiat (@mcvergiat). These three alone posted more than a hundred of tweets and retweets.
However, the most popular tweets were posted by Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel); Jean-Luc Mélenchon (@JLMelenchon) and Guy Verhofstadt (@GuyVerhofstadt). In fact, they were retweeted and liked more than 3,500 times.
In addition to those active on CETA, we also looked at who were the most active MEPs during the entire plenary. Marie Christine Vergiat was the most active of this session followed by EFDD’s Julia Reid (@julia_reid) and EPP’s Michal Boni (@michalBoni). They posted more than a thousand tweets – itchy fingers!
The award to the most popular tweet of the plenary went, once again, to Mr Farage (@Nigel_Farage)with no surprisingly a tweet about Brexit. Mr Verhofstadt (@GuyVerhofstadt) came second with a tweet about Spain helping refuelling the Russian fleet heading to Syria, and Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) got the third position with the above-mentioned tweet about CETA.
Looking at the social impact of political groups, we saw that MEPs from the EPP and the S&D group were by far the most active with more than 2,300 tweets for each group but MEPs from GUE/NGL reached the widest audience – more than six millions people! It is worth noting that the best ratio between number of tweets and people being reached was achieved by the Independents. For each of their tweets (586 in total) they reached an average of 9,000 people!
See you at the next EP plenary 😉