As Twitter has done in the past with big events (both national and global), it has just launched a new activity hub for the 2014 elections.
And while some of its past attempts to organize conversation around certain events (for instance the World Cup) merely provided a place to browse relevant tweets and accounts, the new #Election2014 site is more like a dashboard that lets users explore not only relevant tweets – but insights as well.
Over at election.twitter.com you’ll find data “pulled from a curated list of relevant hashtags, @usernames and other related keywords.” You can look at the gender and age breakdown of politically-themed tweets, a list of the top issues, the latest news from Twitter and a handful of news partners (like USA Today, MSNBC, and Bloomberg), and a constantly-updating stream of relevant tweets.
But the most useful aspect of Twitter’s new elections hub is the ability to break everything down by state and look at the specific gubernatorial and senatorial races happening in specific localities.
All of the data insights update every 24 hours.
“We’ve already observed several themes by exploring this data: the conversation about the Ebola virus ebbs and flows from state to state as local angles emerge; the topic of law enforcement over-indexes in Missouri related to #Ferguson; and President Obama is the principal driver around election talk, even without appearing on any ballots,” says Twitter’s Head of News, Government, and Elections Adam Sharp.
The time is approaching. The 2014 elections are next Tuesday, November 4th.