The virtual campaign: Analysis of the Twitter accounts of Rajoy and Rubalcaba in the 2011 Spanish general elections

Twitter is an online social networking service which has generated a special interest regarding political communication. This piece of research aims to offer one of the first studies about the use of Twitter in a Spanish electoral context through an analysis of the two main candidates' Twitter accounts during the 2011 general elections campaign. To that end a quantitative content analysis was applied to every tweets posted in both accounts (2,319 in total). The analysis focuses on identifying the campaign issues as well as knowing the level of interactivity.