MEPs are back to school – and so are we. As we have been doing this year, we’ve taken a thorough look at their tweets in the first plenary after the summer.

Here is what we found:

  • The speech on the state of the European Union by Mr Juncker completely dominated the online debate – not a big surprise, dah!
  • Quantity, not quality: None of the most active MEPs posted any of the most popular tweets.
  • The EPP’s group account was the most active political group on Twitter and the most shared account of last week. All other groups were far behind.
  • Some of the most popular tweets, including the top one (yes, it was posted by Mr. Farage) were not related to the EP plenary agenda but to national politics.
  • Mr Verhofstadt, leader of the ALDE group, was the most popular political group leader for his tweets on the state of the European Union.

Let’s have a look at what we found. The most active MEPs of the week were:

The most popular tweets were:

The top five most shared accounts by our MEPs were:

On Wednesday morning in less than 2 hours MEPs posted almost 1500 tweets using the hashtag #SOTEU which created an impressive peak in their overall Twitter activity.

Almost 50% of the overall Twitter activity of MEPs was generated on Wednesday. The top five most active MEPs on #SOTEU were:

The top five most popular tweets on #SOTEU were:

The top five most shared accounts on #SOTEU by MEPs were:

Amongst the EP political groups’ leaders, tweets posted by ALDE’s Verhofstadt on #SOTEU were much more popular than the ones posted by his colleagues. He tweeted ‘only’ eleven times but collected more than a thousand retweets and almost 1.5K likes. Mr. Pittella posted the most (fourteen times) but only three were original tweets, the remaining eleven were retweets from third party accounts. He got 38 total retweets and 46 likes. The other political leaders did not create any relevant buzz.

See you at the next EP plenary 😉

@Giammabxl