Rare Scottish MSP twitterers. Below (Left) Alex Salmon & Nigel Don, (Right) John Wilson & Anne McLaughlin.

Providing government and public sector bodies with high speed communications through the UK’s only national fibre optic network Virgin Media Business conducted

The study into the use of Twitter across
Westminster, Holyrood, Cardiff and
Stormont was to determine how effectively politicians are harnessing internet-based communications tools to change the way they talk to voters and the media.
 
The research discloses that (right) Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, is the UK’s most powerful political Tweeter. He rates as the world’s 4,060th most influential Tweeter out of more than 7m users by twitter.grade.com, less than 2,000 places behind the most powerful man, President Barack Obama. The UK’s next most influential political Tweeter is (left) shadow foreign secretary and Labour leadership candidate David Miliband, who is 5,761st in the global rankings.

No Conservative politicians featured in the Global top 10,000, despite of the party’s general election strategy of encouraging candidates to use Twitter as a way of engaging directly with voters. But one conservative (left) MSP, Alex Johnstone is a signed up Tweeter.

Among Westminster politicians Virgin Media Business found that 40% of sitting MPs used Twitter. Some 57% of Liberal Democrat MPs (30 out of 57), including all five of the members who sit in the coalition cabinet, are active Tweeters. Coalition partners, the Conservatives, are less with-it  with only 33% of MPs (102 of 306) signed up to the service and a mere three Tweeting cabinet ministers. On the opposition benches, Labour just beat the Parliamentary average with 42% uptake among MPs, but numbered an impressive 15 out of 29 Tweeters in the shadow cabinet.
 
It's tweeting in the Valleys
Outside of London, the Welsh Assembly emerged as the UK’s second-most Twitter friendly elected chamber, with a take-up rate of 35% per cent among its members. Here Labour and the Conservatives trailed significantly behind the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru.

In Northern Ireland, general uptake among members of the Stormont Assembly was 27%, with Tweeters’ party affiliations reflecting the Province’s unique political makeup.

Cat got the Tartan twits? 
Scotland uncovered the greatest mismatch between devolved and Westminster politics when it came to social networking. Virgin Media Business found that only 18% of Holyrood’s MSPs were Twitter users, compared to 45% uptake among Westminster MPs with Scottish constituencies.

The Scottish National Party also emerged as the most disengaged of all ruling political parties when it came to Twitter, with only four Tweeters out of its 47 MSPs. (Nigel Don, Glasgow, Anne McLaughlin, Glasgow, Alex Salmond, Gordon and John Wilson, Central Scotland.)
 
Political economist commentary
Lee Hull a political economist from Salford University (right) who heads the public sector for Virgin Media Business said: “We’re all agreed the ‘social media election’ that many pundits were promising didn’t entirely transpire.

"But as our study suggests, the reasons for this may be that political engagement on Twitter is still patchy, with some regions and parties showing more commitment than others to the medium.

"Much of this is probably due to the scale of the task involved. The Liberal Democrats may have made the most progress in this field, but they are the smallest major national party, so have fewer politicians and activists to motivate.
 
“Looking at the way our elected politicians engage with Twitter as a new communication tool can, however, give us a glimpse at the future of government. What started as a useful tool for campaigning could be an important step towards a new system where public services & access to elected officials are delivered through multiple communication channels.

"Provided this is underpinned with the right networks and IT strategy, we can look forward to a system of government with far wider reach and greater accountability than anything we have today.”