The twitter campaign #HelloTaravari started on june 19 around 4 PM. On june 22 at 1:10 PM I downloaded (probably) all 1142 tweets that contained the two hashtags used for communicating with the new minister for health of Macedonia: PërshëndetjeTaravari and #ЗдравоТаравари (Albanian and Macedonian language of the hashtag). Those are tweets from a period of around 72 hours.

If the retweets are removed then what remains is 294 original tweets using the hashtags. The volume of tweets (left) and retweets (right) can be seen below. The high volume of tweets and retweets occur in the morning and evening hours. However, it seems that the excitement from the first 36 hours dwindles in the second 36 hours of the chosen period.

This trend might mean that political marketing among Macedonian twitter users is short lived. It seems that even bad jokes aimed at the minister (example: "#HelloTaravari should I eat meat or cheese pie for breakfast?" - sent by @dRskata1 on June 22 at 10:37 AM) don't last more than 3 days. On June 22, just three days after the campaign started the number of original tweets using the hashtags is less then 5 per hour.

The three leading twitter users that use the hashtag to write original tweets are @evilblonddemon, @LOshGZE and @Carbonoxid with 28, 16 and 13 tweets respectively.

However, when the leading #HelloTaravari twitter users are compared to the leading tweeter users from the rankings done at Time.mk (T-index, Top by Reach и Top by Followers), there is only one tweeter account (@evilblonddemon) that is present among the most active / most popular 20 users both generally in Macedonia and using #HelloTaravari. This might be an indicator that political campaigns are not of special interest among those Macedonian twitter users that create the leading content on twitter.

The analysis of the distribution of occurrence of the hashtag since the beginning of the campaign shows that most of the active accounts show up once or twice, while only 25 twitter accounts have 10 or more tweets and retweets with the hashtag #HelloTaravari. The most active accounts have 40 to 60 tweets and retweets during the 72 hour period, ore one tweet every 1.2 -1.8 hours (72 - 108 minutes).

At the and, almost all of the collected 1142 tweets use the Macedonian hashtag. Beside the original ministry announcement tweet, a tweet with a link to a news outlet PortAlb, and a tweet asking if the hashtag is used, every other (seven) tweets are retweets of the ministry's announcement. This means that a total of nine tweets have used the Albanian hashtag in the first 72 hours of the campaign. This might be an indication of the number of twitter users in Macedonia that speak Albanian, as well as indication that the Ministry of health should choose a different channel to talk to with Albanian-speaking citizens instead of Twitter.

Originally published in Macedonian at Radio Free Europe: https://www.slobodnaevropa.mk/a/28576600.html