TheCable

BY ETA USO

A new study has revealed that Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), outperformed Bola Tinubu and Peter Obi on positive ratio metrics in mentions from all discussions about the presidential candidates across all media platforms and fora reviewed.

Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Obi of the Labour Party (LP) are two major presidential candidates in the 2023 general election.

According to the report which adopted artificial intelligence tools to analyse 500,000 mentions of the candidates on both traditional and social media within a one-month period, it revealed that although Atiku Abubakar has less mentions on Twitter, as compared to Peter Obi, he, however, got more positive sentiments from people than the duo of Tinubu and Obi.

This means that people who discussed the candidates said more positive things about Atiku Abubakar than they did for Peter Obi and even expressed lesser positive sentiments about Tinubu.

The 46-page document by CustomReport, an independent research body, was titled the “Brand Insights: Atiku Abubakar’s Online presence compared to Peter Obi’s and Bola Tinubu’s.”

In trying to analyse the politicians’ online presence, the study covered areas such as the positive ratio of the total mentions in discussions about the presidential candidates, the volume and reach of discussions about them, the performance of the discussion sources and the most engaging posts talking about the most engaging moments about them.

Meanwhile, the research relied on a methodology that excludes posts about the candidates that are not in English language.

It also used five metrics to base the generated data for the analysis, and the metrics includes: negative/positive sentiments in the posts about them; mentions and source; social media interactions, posts reach and presence score.

Similarly, it monitored the official Facebook profiles and other social media pages and handles sharing relevant contents about the candidates, digging deep into about 500 thousand posts from May 28 to June 25, 2022 to arrive at its findings.

According to the report on Crack Technology, Atiku’s Twitter handle has more followers than the duo of Peter Obi and Tinubu. He is, however, slightly less mentioned in comments in comparison to Peter Obi on Twitter.

Nevertheless, it revealed that despite being slightly less mentioned, Atiku got more favourable comments than the other candidates.

“Twitter is the fundamental source in building Peter Obi and Bola Tinubu’s reach. While Atiku’s reach on Twitter is slightly less than Obi’s, his sentiment on Twitter is much more positive than competitors.” the study said.

Also, the report revealed that on Facebook, while Atiku has same post reach with Peter Obi, he, however, has the highest volume of post mentions than Tinubu and Obi.

Likewise Atiku’s Instagram “post mention generated more Reach than a single mention in any other source.”
Moreover, in analysing the political popularity of the candidates based on the indices above, the report said that in terms of emotionally charged mentions, while Tinubu and Peter Obi had only about 25% positive mentions in all the conversations in the month under review on all the platforms studied, Atiku Abubakar had 55% positive mentions in all the discussions from people talking about the candidates.

It noted that the most popular mentions about the three candidates referred to them as “president.”

“In every case, the most popular topics of discussion were recognised as those within which people referred to the politicians as presidents,” said the study.

Conversely, in terms of negative mentions, the study revealed that both Peter Obi and Tinubu had more negative mentions than Atiku Abubakar. While Atiku had just 50% negatively charged content about him, both Tinubu and Peter Obi respectively had 90% negatively charged content about them.

Also, the report noted that Twitter was the major source of negative discussions about the three candidates.

“However, in Bola Tinubu and Peter Obi’s cases – negatives noticeably outweighed positives, accounting for 79% and 77% of all emotionally charged mentions. In Abubakar’s case, the sentiment distribution tilted in favour of positives, which accounted for approximately 55% of all sentiment-bearing mentions,” the study noted.

Again, the report found out that Facebook was equally very significant in generating positive mentions about the former vice president.

It said, “There were approximately 1.8 thousand of them recorded, which exceeds the number of positive Facebook mentions about Bola Tinubu and Peter Obi altogether.”

In terms of videos, Atiku equally took the lead in positive mentions as compared to Peter Obi and Tinubu.

“Atiku’s sentiment was way better than Bola Tinubu or Peter Obi’s. All of Atiku Abubakar’s top 5 topics of discussion were recorded to have favourable values of positive ratio, indicating the superiority of the number of positives over the number of negatives.”

“In Bola Tinubu and Peter Obi’s cases – every topic recognised was characterised by unfavourable values of positive ratio, with the number of negatives being much higher than the number of positives.”

On post reach, Twitter generated the largest volume of mentions for Peter Obi, the mentions do not translate as much to very significant positive value as the wide reach, solely because majority of those organising discussions generating such mentions are from, though numerous, but low-sized and average-profile individuals.

However, “on average, a single mention about Atiku had 89% higher reach than the content on Tinubu,” the report said.

Atiku’s most engaging posts: In terms of engagement mentions, the Wazirin Adamawa garnered more positive engagements from Facebook posts as compared to the ex-Anambra governor and ex-Lagos governor whose chunk of engaging mentions came from Twitter channels and TikTok videos respectively.
Atiku’s highest engaging post on Facebook was about his choice of a running mate on the June 16. That post generated about 8 million visits and 312,409 thousand interactions on Facebook alone.

Following this post were others like posts on May 28, announcing Atiku’s emergence as the presidential candidate of the PDP which generated 163,768 interactions and over a million post visits on Facebook alone; and his June 15 post about playing host to the Turkish ambassador to Nigeria, which generated about 4 million visits and 38.8k post interactions.

Bola Tinubu’s most engaging posts: For Bola Tinubu, his most engaging post was that on TikTok by a Tiktoker, ElectionUpdatesNG on June 3, 2022 which posted a video where Tinubu asked stakeholders to elect him for president. The video generated 2.2 million post visits and 85.5k post interactions.

Also, coming second highest for Tinubu was another TikTok post by TikToker, Bodealawiye on June 4, which generated 1.4 million post visits and 80.3k interactions.

A third post about Tinubu, was yet on TikTok by Fidebrightajor1 on June 22 which generated 550.1k post visits and 32.2k post interactions.

Peter Obi’s most engaging posts:
For Peter Obi, his most engaging post was by him on Facebook wherein on June 14, he announced he was departing for Egypt on a 3-day visit for comparable countries with Nigeria. That post generated about 7.1 million post visits and 70.7 thousand interactions.

Also, his Facebook post on 13th June urging, especially his supporters, to accord due respect to every other candidate generated 4.7 million visits and 47.2 thousand post interactions.
A third post about PO with the highest engagement was from a Twitter user, Ayomide Tayo, with handle @AOT2, urging other supporters to not only vote for PO but also vote for other Labour Party candidates for other political positions.

On Instagram: “Atiku’s average reach per single Instagram mention was 28% higher than competitors’, (i.e., 25.9K to 20.8 and 19.9),” the report said.

This summary was written by Eta Uso. Uso is the special assistant, digital media operations to Atiku Abubakar