Episode 2: IMANI Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election analysis (PULSE)

In the run up to the 2024 General Elections, IMANI presents PULSE, a fortnightly curated social media based sentiment analysis report designed to follow the “pulse” of Ghanaians in the run up to the 2024 Election.

1. The period under observation for this edition of the report is from the 27th of December to the 14th of January 2024.

2. Previously, the positive sentiment of the NPP per 100 social media posts was 9.74%, while that of the NDC was 20%. The results for this period under review has seen NPP have an increase in positive sentiment to around 12%, while that of NDC has fallen significantly to 14.7%, marking a fall of about 5.3% in positive sentiment, which is quite significant.

3.NPP still leads in terms of negative sentiments and mentions on social media. Proportionally, the percentage of negative mentions of the NPP has reduced from the previous levels of over 90% to around 66% for the NPP for the period under review. This means that generally, the NPP is having more positive sentiment than a month earlier

4. NDC gained over 20% more mentions proportionally. Previously, NDC had only 14% of total mentions in the previous period, but this has increased to 38% of all mentions.

5. A huge gain for the NDC is the estimated social media reach, where over the period under review, the NDC’s head-to-head estimated social media reach moved from around 3 million to over 18 million, while NPP’s also moved from 14 million to around 25 million.

6. It is very clear that there are more discussions and reaches made by both parties, but the audience related to the NDC or NDC related news has increased by sixfold in relation to the previous period under review.

7. One significant statistic is the non-social media reach, which shows the number of impressions on news items and articles not on social media, but other sources of information on the internet, like news websites, blogs, podcasts and articles.

8. For non-social media reach for the period, the NPP has almost exactly twice the reach of the NDC, with over 7.4 million impressions as against NDC’s 3.7 million. Comparatively, the same period earlier, the NPP had 4 million as against NDC’s 89,000 non-social media impressions.

9. Per mentions and tags, one of the biggest keywords in positive mentions of the NPP candidate, Dr Bawumia, is the word possible. The #itispossible hashtag seems to be the most associated with posts concerning Dr Bawumia. The second most popular hashtag is #DMB2024.

10. For candidate Mahama, the major hashtags for his mentions include #ChangeIsComing and #24HourEconomy. In future analyses, some of these keywords will be analyzed to determine the sentiments along these keywords as they also determine the feelings of social media users towards major pronouncements and policies.

11. Other Contenders:
Here are the Social Media Reach of other contenders are examined. There are not enough mentions on social media to elicit sentiment analysis. For this reason, only two out of the six shortlisted contenders are featured with statistics in this report. Subsequent reports will gather more data and mentions to determine the sentiment levels.

11a.The first of the independent candidates is Alan Kyerematen with his Butterfly Movement having a social media reach of about 245,000 reach on social media with over 6000 engagements and comments.

11.b The new entrant into the discussion is Nana Kwame Bediako with his New Force Movement. His entry into the social media space is an impressive one with a reach of 6.5 million with unique engagements amounting to about 418,000 on social media networks. This could indicate some resonance of the youth towards Nana Kwame Bediako. However, sentiments related to his mentions show a 52% positive sentiment rate among mentions that can be rated.

PS: Each of these reports costs $1000 to generate. IMANI needs your kind support to keep this project going. Let us know if you can help. Please get in touch with IMANI's Vice-president for technology strategy and development, Selorm Branttie ([email protected]). All media enquiries about this report should be directed at Selorm and IMANI' senior vice-president Kofi Bentil

Read the detailed report with fascinating charts@ IMANI Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election analysis (PULSE)

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