Twitter predicts Labour victory

Political Twitter group Tweetminister is predicting a small Labour majority or a hung parliament after analysing millions of messages on Twitter.

The results chime with those of traditional pollsters who are also predicting a very close General Election race, but it is one of the few polls to predict that Gordon Brown might emerge victorious.

The political micro-bloggers will continue to analyse Twitter as the election progresses to see if word-of-mouth mentions of the candidates can help to predict who will be the winners and losers on polling day.

So far it has already analysed 2 million tweets for the study, taking its inspiration from a project in Japan's 2009 General Election which looked into the correlation between "online buzz" and election results.

With a little more than a month until the expected May 6 election, Tweetminister is predicting that voters will return a small majority for Labour or a hung parliament. Overall it puts Conservatives on 34 per cent, Labour on 35 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 22 per cent.

The group has also listed the ten most influential electoral candidates on Twitter calculated by a ratio score of the frequency of mentions verses the number of personal tweets.

The most influential tweeters include Labour's Tom Watson and David Miliband as well as Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, Tory chairman Eric Pickles and novelist Louise Bagshawe.