Thread by @rhyscrilley

Before we have polls to indicate how the Alba Party might do in the upcoming Scottish elections I thought I'd have a quick look at what social media tells us about their support...

#Holyrood2021 #SP2021

Alba officially launched last week, and since then they have gained:

⚫️ 8868 Twitter followers

⚫️ 1518 Facebook followers

Those don't feel like the levels of support I would expect a popular party with electoral potential to have. In fact I'm surprised by how small it is...

According to @crowdtangle, the Alba Party have only had a total of 5126 interactions on Facebook (likes, shares, comments, reactions) in the past week.

The majority of these (2993 interactions) were from the launch day...

So even if the party has a strong base, they aren't engaging with the party that much on Facebook, which is where you would expect grassroots members to be busy interacting & sharing content...

If we look at Alex Salmond's official Facebook page we see a similar trend in interactions, but with an even smaller daily average.

It seems that if Alba has lots of supporters, they aren't rallying around the leader & sharing/engaging with his content on Facebook...

Let's have a look at how the launch of Alba went down with Alex Salmond's Facebook followers.

When you total the reactions, you see that more people felt negatively about the video (they laughed, were angry or were sad) than felt positively about it (likes, loves, wow)...

When you look at the "most relevant" comments on Salmond's launch of the Alba party, you see it hasn't gone down well.

People suggest he is "sabotaging the independence movement" & "continuing to undermine independence"...

In fact, of the top 51 "most relevant" comments (based on those with the most engagement) 47 of them express negative sentiments towards Salmond and Alba.

They claim that Salmond has "an ego the size of Ben Nevis", is "a gift for the unionists" & "an absolute weapon"...

We await the polls for detailed & representative data on public opinion about Alba, but it seems that they have failed to galvanise much of a digital following so far...

In an election in the midst of a pandemic, for a fringe start-up party like Alba to win seats I would expect them to need a large & engaged digital following.

Right now, they definitely don't have that.

#Holyrood2021 #SP2021

For anyone who was interested in this thread, I've expanded on it in the @heraldscotland 👇

heraldscotland.com/news/19204625.…