Amid all the buzz about the influence of social networking sites like Twitter on political campaigning, we often forget about how the majority of people in the UK get their news online – through portals like Yahoo and MSN.
With 22 million unique monthly users, MSN (originally the Microsoft Network) reaches approximately 50% of the entire UK online audience. With Windows Live Messenger, MSN’s hugely popular instant messaging program, included the figure reaches 27million. In comparison, Twitter is used by around 3.5m people in the UK every month.
As the default homepage for all PCs shipped with Windows (and that’s a lot of computers), MSN reaches right across the wide online spectrum – including “silver surfers” and casual web users – very many of whom eschew traditional newspapers or TV news.
And that’s why the event we held this week at MSN – a Q&A webcast with David Cameron – was so important. It gave David the opportunity to engage with a really important community that includes a lot of people who will be voting for the first time when the General Election is finally called.
And the level of engagement was very high – we had a huge number of questions come in on a wide range of topics, and the live webcast on Thursday evening (filmed in front of an audience made up mostly of first-time voters) was broadcast to an even bigger online audience.
We’ll be holding a lot more events like this in the run-up to the election as we look to ensure that as many people as possible get the opportunity to put their questions to David and the Shadow Cabinet and hear about our plans to change Britain.
If you missed the MSN event, a replay is available to watch in full here. And if you want to find out first about future webcast events, click here to sign up for our regular e-mail bulletins.
( 4 comments ) Tags: MSN, Twitter, webcast
Comment by richard bullman on February 19, 2010 at 6:03 pm
Interesting, Craig, however it’s what is said that is deficient, rather than the medium.
Can you kick some of these nice ex-public school duffers into injecting some pithy hard-hitting language into the Conservative message.
Mostly, Conservatives speaking is just soporific. I could write better speeches, even without my anger meter registering.
Comment by Noel Johnson on February 19, 2010 at 8:34 pm
MSN Messenger for Mac, on the other hand, is used by nearly no-one. Because it is truly, truly aweful.
And Microsoft must like it like that, because they make no effort to keep it in the right decade.
Comment by Chris D on February 21, 2010 at 10:33 am
MSN might be the default page on PCs but what makes you think that everyone leaves it that way? My default page is something else entirely. I never visit MSN, never use Windows Messenger, never use social networking and quite frankly, never rely on mainstream media for truth.
Comment by Bar Mitzvah Venues Advisor on February 26, 2010 at 2:26 pm
I’m glad to hear MSN is more popular than Twitter. I’m getting tired of hearing about Twitter all the time. But it’s a bit sad that 50% of UK is using instant messaging instead of human communication…