If Facebook determined the future of Irish politics, here’s how it would go based on the number of ‘likes’ each official Facebook party page has…
- Fine Gael – 3,098 likes | 3,061 twitter followers
- Sinn Féin – 2,898 members (they only have an official ‘group’, not page) | 3,361 twitter followers
- Fianna Fáil – 2,137 likes | 4,488 twitter followers
- Labour – 1,816 likes | 5,319 twitter followers
- Green Party – 230 likes | 4,868 twitter followers
So there you have it, Facebook has spoken. Interestingly, Sinn Féin are the only party not to have a link to Facebook on their website. There goes my vote guys, tut tut, shows how much you care about technology 😉 The rest are pretty eager to promote their social networking profiles even though i do get the impression they are simply hopping on the bandwagon and using social media because everyone else is using it, not because they want to.
As you can see if the election were decided by twitter follower numbers, we’d have slightly different results. Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how these stats change over the next couple of weeks in the run up to the election on February 25th. Perhaps if voting was as simple as clicking a ‘like’ button, more people might be inclined to vote.