On Twitter: what does your Ripon MP Julian Smith 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 Skipton and Ripon is on the social media platform.

Analysis of Julian Smith's Twitter account (@JulianSmithUK) by Motive PR shows he had sent around 7,800 tweets between first joining the website on July 1 2012 and March 29 this year.

It means the 50-year-old sends an average of around 2.2 tweets per day – equating to 67 per month.

This account was created after Mr Smith 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.

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

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.

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).

Julian Smith, who serves as a backbench MP, had around 37,400 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.