Pakatan Rakyat (PR) revealed its alternative budget yesterday. Compared to last year there seems to be a slight increase in users tweeting about the budget.
On September 26th 2012, 1440 users wrote 2663 tweets about PR and Federal budget-related terms.
On October 4th 2011 when Pakatan Rakyat’s alternative budget was released, 1046 users wrote 2124 tweets about PR alternative budget and (Barisan Nasional) Federal budget-related terms.
From 2011 to 2012, that is an increase of 37.67% in users and 25.38% in terms of tweets. The average tweets/user decreased from 2.03 to 1.85 tweets/user.
One of the hashtags used by promoters of PR’s alternative budget, #BelanjawanPR, trended in Malaysia for a cumulative total of 340 minutes (5 hours 40 mins). It started at 6th place at 4.30pm for 10 minutes before quickly dropping to 8th place by 4.50pm. It continued to trend on/off at 7th and 8th places before ending at 8th place at 12.10am the next day.
Please note that in both years a significant number of people were tweeting about the upcoming BN budget and not the PR budget. An initial sampling of the tweets indicated that for 2012, an estimated 610 users (out of 1440) were referring to the PR budget. So it is possible that PR’s popularity when it comes to its budget has declined. A more detailed analysis will have to wait.
On October 7th 2011 when the Federal budget was tabled, 5972 users wrote 13961 tweets about PR and Federal budget-related terms. That’s almost six times the amount of users talking about the PR alternative budget. It should be interesting to see if the gap widens this Friday.
