Who's winning the Twitter race?

In earlier posts I have referred to MPs who Twitter, and that the number is slowly rising. Today I had a look at how many Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs) have a Twitter account. Tweetminster lists 151 who claim to have a Twitter account, but I found that only 129 have a 'sticky' account. Stickiness, as with my research on MPs use of Twitter, was measured by whether they had tweeted within the last month.

Nine individual party's candidates had a Twitter account, plus three Independent candidates. In terms of parties the results were:
Conservative (44)
Labour (45)
Liberal Democrat (25)
Green party (5)
UKIP (4)
Libertarian Party UK (LPUK) (2)
SNP (1)

It has been suggested that the Internet might help level the playing field between the smaller and larger parties, but the evidence here is that on Twitter there is a politics as usual, with the big 3 parties dominating.

We also note that the Conservatives, although elsewhere considered to be winning the online campaign, seem to be a bit under-represented on Twitter. The Conservatives presumably have the highest number of target seats, but this data would suggest that they are not necesarily turning to Twitter in those seats.

In terms of gender, nearly two-thirds (72.1%) of tweeting PPCs are male. I don't know what the overall gender spplit on PPCs are, but it would be interesting to compare these to see whether women are over- or -under-represented on Twitter.