Social media too is providing new ways to crunch numbers during election campaigns, with tools such as PoliTwitter demonstrating how political parties are being discussed online.

Click here to view the recent PoliTwitter data.

Other Twitter and Facebook polls also provide fuel social media metrics, but Sidneyeve Matrix, a media professor at Queen’s University, warns against reading too much into them.

“That kind of popularity contest is not going to necessarily translate into behaviour at the ballot box,” she said. “It’s really interesting, but it might not tell us the whole story.”

The problem with social media polling is that you can’t tell is participating and whether they are even eligible to vote. Twitter is especially a niche market, haunted by journalists, politicians and activities, says Matrix.

Some parties also simply have more followers because they have been on Twitter or Facebook for a longer time. There is also the potential for parties to create more than one profile and use it to promote themselves.

“The verifiability of the data on Twitter leaves something to be desired,” Matrix says. “We have some growing to do there for sure.”