By Pascal Oparada
Social Media/Tech Reporter
As the race for who becomes the next Lagos State governor hots up, candidates of various political parties are putting up a stiff fight to win the hearts of voters, both conventional and digital.
Online presence of candidates goes a long way in gauging their popularity, reach and engagement with potential voters.
TheNiche Data Analysis Unit chased down the performance of two popular candidates for the top job in Lagos – Jimi Agbaje of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
Intelligence from CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring tool, shows that the candidate of PDP, Jimi Agbaje, is poles ahead of his opponent, Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the APC.
TheNiche tracked their social media presence, engagements, mentions and interactions.
Two social media networks were monitored – Facebook and Twitter – and their performance were aggregated into percentages.
Data from Facebook shows that interest in Agbaje started building up on November with almost 3,000 mentions and interactions on the social network. While that of his opponent, Sanwo-Olu picked up about the same time with almost 5,000 mentions and interactions.
Agbaje began to lead towards the end of November with 78 per cent of 180,000 reach to potential voters as against Sanwo-Olu’s 22 per cent representing 52,000 reach to potential voters.
Agbaje generated 97 per cent of the total reactions (Love, angry, haha, wow and sad) at 149,000 to 0.03 per cent of the total reactions at 4,000.
Agbaje’s presence on Facebook generated 96 per cent of the total comments at 10,000 while Sanwo-Olu generated 3 per cent of the total comments at 396.
A total of 21,000 people shared materials relating to Agbaje representing 96 per cent. While 858 people shared Sanwo-Olu’s materials representing 4 per cent of the total shares.
On Twitter, Agbaje had a total reach of 196,000 representing 56 per cent while Sanwo-Olu had 151,000 total reach to potential voters representing 43 per cent.
Agbaje had 127,000 likes on Twitter representing 85 per cent reach to potential voters, while Sanwo-Olu had a total of 151,000 likes representing 65 per cent to potential voters.
Agbaje had a total of 68,000 retweets at 62 per cent while Sanwo-Olu had a total of 42,000 retweets at 36 per cent.
The issues most popular with the two candidates are infrastructure, social investments, economy and transportation in that order.
Whether these candidates translate their social media engagement to actual votes is left for them.