The Labour party says a new tool for online campaigning called Thunderclap has been a "phenomenal success" after using it for a Twitter onslaught.
The Thunderclap website lets supporters of a cause pledge to all tweet a message at the same time, boosting the audience of the slogan by orders of magnitude.
In Labour's case, at 10am on Sunday, 848 people, including party leader Ed Miliband, comedian Eddie Izzard and the actor David Morrissey automatically tweeted:
It’s time to deal with David Cameron’s cost of living crisis. Let’s freeze gas and electricity bills. #freezethatbill http://thndr.it/1ixNa2y
Thunderclap's statistics show that the tweet made it on to the feed of 4.5 million people, almost exactly as many as watched the BBC News at Ten on Sunday 3 November.
A Labour spokesperson described the campaign as a "phenomenal success" and said that the party would use the tool again, although when and how often remains undecided until it has had a chance to look at the feedback in more detailed terms.
The Liberal Democrats were the first party to use Thunderclap in the UK, with 127 people signing up in February to tweet a link to a page celebrating the party's achievements with the click-bait question "What the hell have the Lib Dems done now?" But without Labour's celebrity support, that message was only shared with 127,000 people.
The idea behind Thunderclap is to use supporters who have friends outside the political bubble to spread the message beyond the sort of people who normally hear Labour's slogans. But that means there is collateral damage, in the form of people who do follow a number of politicians and activists.
"That has led to some predictable snarking from those in the Westminster village bubble who suddenly saw dozens of identical messages in their timeline," writes Mark Ferguson, the editor of LabourList, "[but] most people don’t follow every Labour MP/activist/supporter on Twitter, so will only have seen it once or twice. A message to those complaining about seeing it too much – you’re not the target audience."
"There’s going to be a lot more of this"
Twitter users who don't want to see the posts can hide them, with a bit of effort. To do so requires a Twitter client which can mute keywords. Examples include Tweetdeck, Tweetbot or Janetter on the desktop, Twitterrific or Tweetbot on iOS, or Falcon Pro on Android.
Once installed, muting the domain "thndr.it" will ensure that no tweets show up on the main feed. That might not seem important now, but as Buzzfeed's Jim Waterson writes, "there’s going to be a lot more of this in the runup to the next election."
The Thunderclap was just a small part of a wider campaign. In the 24 hours after it began, Labour reported 5285 tweets with the hashtag in it, causing it to trend in London and Liverpool. Additionally, the online team reached 61,000 people on Facebook, and more still on email.
