The Democratic Alliance (DA) had its elective congress this past weekend, where Hele Zille was reelected for her another 5-year term as the leader of the party.
#DACongress also trended on Twitter.
The hashtag peaked at 6708 tweets on Saturday, and reached 3848 yesterday; according to Topsy.
The secrete to #DACongress’s trending lies in its top 20 Twitterers:
The table above shows that all the top 4  Twitterers of the hashtag – @da_news (16K followers, Klout score 67), @mbalimcdust (+2,5K followers, Klout score of 70), @lindimazibuko (+40K followers, Klout score of 79) and @helenzille (+205K followers, Klout score of 78) – are part of the DA.
To make the point about the influence of the top 4 twitterers in the table above, here are the top 2 most mentioned #DACongress tweets:
Lindiwe Mazibuko and Helen Zille both appear in The Guardian Africa Network’s recently published  Africa’s Top 10 tweeting politicians. The only other South African politician on the list is Julius Malema, the former ANC Youth League President.
The lesson here is that an organisation (political or not) stands a good chance of having its events trending on Twitter if some of its members are influential on this social network.
Now on to an event that occurred on the sidelines of the #DAConference, and which caught my attention. Here are three of the tweets that got DA, and Clive Simpkins, really hot under the collar:
Notice that all the 3 tweets above come from the same person. The last tweet, which appears to be a retraction, did not appease the DA massive.
Read more about a Twitter conversation ignited by the 3 tweets above on my Storify.
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