‘Yes’ campaign dominating recent media coverage, online activity: Meltwater research
The Yes campaign is enjoying a last-minute surge, dominating conversations on social media, news coverage, and broadcast media over the past month.
This is according to data released today by Meltwater. The company’s ‘Voice Dashboard’ tracks and collates real-time data from across news, broadcast, and social media channels in Australia, and globally, to compare the share of engagement, conversation, and coverage of the Yes and No campaigns.
The company crunched 4.86 million mentions across social media, online news, broadcast, and print articles, published since the start of 2023, in order to track the ebbs and flows of the duelling campaigns.
Mentions of Vote Yes vs Vote No campaigns across social, broadcast and news – this year
Total mentions
Not surprisingly, over the past thirty days, overall conversations about The Voice have increased by over 50%, compared to the prior thirty-day period.
The Yes campaign has had 802,000 instances of ‘engagement’ – up by 55% — over the past month, compared to the No campaign’s 311,000 over the past 30 days.
Mentions of Vote Yes vs Vote Not campaigns across social, broadcast and news – last 90 days
Playing against type, Twitter (or X, if we must) is where the Yes campaign is building the most notable momentum, with more than double the rate of Twitter impressions than the No campaign – over one billion in the past thirty days, compared to 432 million for the No campaign. #voteyes is the most-used hashtag, appearing 200,000 times in the past 30 days.
Share of Voice by mentions – Twitter
The No campaign is, however, drawing male voters in the final stretch. Sticking with X, ‘No’ mentions and engagement from males make up 65% of the total, up 3.5% in the last month.
ABC News and The Australian are the “top two key opinion leaders” for the Yes campaign on X, according to Meltwater data, while for the No campaign, it is Sky News Australia, and noted racist American podcaster Elijah Schaffer.
It’s interesting to note the ideological split between The Australian and Sky News Australia, who both belong to the same media stable.
The chart below shows the late surge for the Yes campaign, and which news events drove these peaks.
The ‘Yes’ marches in Sydney and New York resulted in the largest spike to date, with Anthony Albanese declaring last month he will not legislate a voice to parliament should the referendum fail also resulting in a huge upswing of activity in the Yes camp.
The Voice Australia – Key Spikes
The vote happens on October 14, and given the last-minute advertising blitz from both camps — the ‘No’ campaign hitting hard in swing state South Australia, while the Yes campaign dropped a $20 million television commercial, and spent over 400,000 on screen advertising at this weekend’s NRL grand final — it’s expected that momentum will shift right up until the final vote is placed.
Meltwater’s ever-changing ‘Voice Dashboard’ can be viewed here.
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Nathan Jolly is the Deputy Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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