On Twitter: what does your Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Andrew Jones do?

Andrew Jones has sent more than 1,500 tweets since setting up his account, analysis of his online activity reveals.
On Twitter: what does  your Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Andrew Jones do?On Twitter: what does  your Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Andrew Jones do?
On Twitter: what does your Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Andrew Jones do?

In the last of our series looking at the work of our politicians, we take a look at how active the Conservative MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough is on the social media platform.

Analysis of Andrew Jones's Twitter account (@AJonesMP) by Motive PR shows he had sent around 1,600 tweets between first joining the website on September 1 2012 and March 29 this year.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It means the 58-year-old sends an average of less than one tweet per day – putting out just 14 per month.

This account was created after Mr Jones was elected to his seat – on May 6 2010.

The average MP that has an account sends 3.5 tweets per day, but around one in 10 representatives did not have one at the time the research was done.

Read More
In the Commons: what does your Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Andrew Jones do?

Labour MP Karl Turner is the most prolific Tweeter – sending an average of 26.1 per day for 12 years.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The roughly 600 MPs with accounts had sent almost 8 million tweets between them by the end of March.

But Motive said they found little correlation between the number of tweets and retweets an MP sent, and the number of followers they have.

Despite his steady output, Mr Turner has fewer than 41,000 followers – below the average of 54,300 for MPs with accounts.

And though he has tweeted fewer than 6,000 times, Boris Johnson's account is followed by 4.1 million people.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The Prime Minister is one of just four MPs with more than a million followers – ahead of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (2.4 million), current Labour leader Keir Starmer (1.2 million) and ex-PM Theresa May (1 million).

Andrew Jones, who serves as a backbench MP, had around 15,900 followers by the end of March.

Of parties with at least 10 members, Labour was reaching the largest section of the electorate – with an average of 63,500 followers each.

Meanwhile, the Scottish National Party's 45 members averaged just 29,300 each.

Despite not taking their seats in the Commons due to their abstentionist policy, Sinn Fein MPs have tweeted almost 80,000 times from their official accounts.