PoliMonitor, the free political research, engagement and monitoring service, has expanded its coverage beyond the UK to now monitor politicians from across the EU and North America.
Tracking just 650 MPs at its launch in January, the service will now monitor over 10,000 parliamentarians from around the globe. With no registration or payment needed, users can sign up to receive a daily email with all tweets by national politicians which mention keywords, policies and people of interest.
The London startup co-founded by former Lib Dem staffers Sam Cunningham and Olly Kendall and developer Dan Hartropp, will now cover fifteen parliaments outside the UK including the US Congress in Washington, the Cortes Generales in Madrid as well as the European Parliament. PoliMonitor plans to continue with its aggressive expansion adding more national assemblies by the end of the year.
Alongside the expanded free-to-use service, PoliMonitor has also launched its first paid for premium service PoliMonitor Plus, allowing clients to have relevant tweets in their daily alerts translated from any EU language into their language of choice.
“With politicians across Europe increasingly using Twitter as the social media platform of choice we wanted to let charities and for profits follow and interact with these debates for free. For us, this meant biting the bullet and increasing the number of politicians we track by a factor of ten or more overnight. While no small task, the response we’ve received has proved the demand was there and it was the right next step for PoliMonitor." said co-founder Sam Cunningham. He added, “The language issue is of course still one of the major hurdles to EU monitoring, so we’ve created a new function to translate relevant tweets from any EU language into English or any other language.”
As well as an expanded monitoring service, PoliMonitor also sees its bespoke research and report writing service as increasingly important to its clients, analysing long term trends based on its database of over 4 million tweets by national politicians.