Structure of the political tweets during the electoral campaigns of 2015 and 2016 in Spain

Abstract

Twitter has become one of the main media for spreading political messages. The structure of these messages, or tweets, is compounded by four elements -text, hashtags, mentions, and links- that can be used, organized, and repeated with the only limitation of 140 characters at most. The objective of this work is to analyze how users of political conversations gave structure to their tweets, and what the impact this structure has in the spread or retweet of these messages. We analyze two samples of more than half a million tweets each, related to the Spanish general elections in 2015 and 2016. The result show significant differences in the order and amount of elements in the tweets used by politicians, media, journalists, and citizens. In particular, politicians tend to make a greater use of hashtags, and media use more links. The spread of tweets depends upon the presence of these links, the number of followers, and the number of hashtags. This work contributes with knowledge of the strategies applied by politicians, media, and journalists in the elaboration of electoral campaign tweets.