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Elizabeth May the talk of Twitter town for crashing election debate

Elizabeth May the talk of Twitter town for crashing election debate

She wasn’t even invited but Green Party Leader Elizabeth May emerged the social media winner of this week’s federal leadership debate.

May was not allowed to participate in the event hosted by the Globe and Mail in Calgary, so she hosted her own debate night from Victoria. From there, she tweeted her two cents-worth in real-time.

“For an economic debate, they sure left out some important issues,” May said.

“Not a single mention of women at the #BoysClub,” she retweeted from the party feed, with the hashtag #GlibandMale.

The strategy was “ridiculously” successful, says Steve Ladurantaye, head of news and government partnerships for Twitter Canada.

All party leaders see a bump in conservation about them on a debate night, he says.

“She drove a lot of attention her way that she might not have seen otherwise and maybe helped herself there,” Ladurantaye says.

The Green leader emerged with 3,900 new followers the morning after the debate, according to Twitter. Since she announced she would crash the party via the social media site at the beginning of the week, May has picked up a total of 7,700 new followers.

Still, that brings her to a total of 186,000 followers on her English language feed and just 2,290 on her French feed, compared to 894,000 and 20,200, respectively, for Conservative Leader Stephen Harper. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s bilingual feed has 746,000 followers and NDP Leader Tom Mulcair’s bilingual feed 173,000.

May gathered 14,000 favourites and retweets of her dozens of remarks and video responses during the two-hour debate.

She was mentioned in 14,161 tweets – the most of any leader. Trudeau was a distant second with 8,126, followed by Mulcair with 5,562 and Harper with 5,394.

“That’s a big night for any of those leaders. It’s more conversation than they would see on a typical day for sure,” Ladurantaye tells Yahoo Canada News.

The debate itself was the talk of Twitter town in Canada. There were more than 94,000 tweets using the hashtag #GlobeDebate as the leaders verbally sparred and nearly by the next day. Tens of thousands more comments were posted on Twitter under the hashtags #elxn42 and #cdnpoli.

“They were talking about Trudeau the most, then Harper, then Mulcair,” Ladurantaye says. “It’s important to remember that being talked about the most isn’t always an indication that you’ve won, necessarily.

“There was no knock-out moment for any of them, I don’t think.”

None of the country’s big broadcasters aired the debate. It was broadcast on the parliamentary channel CPAC and on YouTube, which had more than 308,000 views by Friday afternoon.

Both Google and Twitter saw a lot of traffic over Harper’s reference to “old stock Canadians.”

“It was almost like a small boil, in terms of search activity,” says Google spokesman Aaron Brindle. “It wasn’t trending during the debate but it certainly was after.”

And Google, which partnered with the Globe and Mail in the debate, saw a similar spike in interest in May.

“She had a tremendous presence on social media last night and that was absolutely reflected in terms of search activity,” Brindle tells Yahoo Canada News.

Similar to Twitter, searches for Trudeau outpaced those for Harper or Mulcair.

“It’s important to note this is not like a poll,” Brindle says.