For those of us in the UK, Twitter was flooded with discussion relating to the Leaders’ Debate on ITV. The debate featured the leaders of seven political parties, each discussing why they should get the viewer’s vote on Thursday 7th May 2015.

In just a matter of hours, the #LeadersDebate hashtag was mentioned more than 1.2 million times, as it quickly became the most popular hashtag on Twitter.

Rather than speculate and listen to what’s being said on TV, I wanted to run my own analysis of the discussion. To do so, I relied on the power of Brandwatch, a social listening tool with a ton of real-time capabilities. I’ll use this to evaluate the winners and losers, as judged by tweets.

Volume of Discussion

I’m starting by looking at the volume to understand which politician created the greatest buzz around their time on the show. I’ve looked purely at the number of mentions relating to the politicians and their parties. This doesn’t include anything about positivity/negativity, that’ll come along shortly.

As you can see from the chart above, it was Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party which led the way. Her presence accounted for 24.1% of the discussion which referenced either the leaders or the party they were representing. Nigel Farage managed to ensure his party generated 20.4% of all discussion during the show. The complete rundown is as follows:

SNP: 24.1%

UKIP: 20.4%

Labour: 17%

Conservatives: 15.1%

Liberal Democrats: 9.3%

Plaid Cymru: 7.2%

Green Party: 6.9%

@Politicians

@NicolaSturgeon was by far the most engaged with politician on the night, with her account being referenced 41,000+ times. @NatalieBen was the only politican to outperform @theSNP, mentioned 14,000+ times, just 1,000 more than Sturgeon’s party. Despite boasting 221,000 followers, @Nick_Clegg attracted just 5,000 mentions.

@NicolaSturgeon (147,000 followers): 41,200 mentions

@NatalieBen (63,300 followers): 14,850 mentions

@Nigel_Farage (203,000 followers): 13,800 mentions

@LeanneWood (19,300 followers): 13,000 mentions

@Ed_Miliband (411,000 followers): 11,000 mentions

@David_Cameron (955,000 followers): 7,750 mentions

@Nick_Clegg (221,000 followers): 5,000 mentions