Ahead of the third and final leader debate the Labour Party urging supporters to donate their avatars on Twitter and Facebook and invite their friends to “I’m Voting Labour on May 6″ events.

Tonight Labour is devoting its homepage to aggregating the best of Twitter and Facebook from Labour Ministers, candidates, bloggers, activists and the official Labour feed.

Supporters will be able to tweet from the Labour website without having to go back into their Twitter account and the same for Facebook where supporters can update their status.

There will be a live stream of the BBC coverage, so people can watch the debate and engage with their social networks via the page. That’s going to be really important and is something all the parties, if they are smart, should be doing. Having such visible content it allows supporters to quickly rebut lines used by David Cameron and Nick Clegg (or versa visa) during and immediately after the debate, which seeds out quickly into social media channels.

The ability to instantly rebut was something that the Barrack Obama’s team did so well in 2008.

Tonight’s activity is expected to be much higher than last week’s where the number of tweets and posts fell in line with TV rating reflecting that the second debate was broadcast only on digital TV on Sky and BBC News.

In an effort to battle through the noise Labour will incentivise its supporters to tweet and re-tweet as much as possible and give them the material and content they need to pass on to their peer networks.

Even though the number of tweets fell last week there were still more than 142,000 and more than 220,000 logged onto Facebook making it difficult for any of the parties to get their message heard above the noise.

Labour has evolved its “Get Out The Vote” push with the aim is to help “peer-to-peer campaigning and create the online equivalent of putting a poster in their window”.

Not sure if it is just me but I’ve noticed less window posts around this time, which is why the “Donate your avatar” idea is potentially quite powerful. We’ve all seen the Twibbons, but Labour is urging supporters to go further with a full party avatar for maximum impact.

If they want to go further still they can change their background on their Twitter account so that every visitor to a supporters’ profile sees they are voting Labour.

The Tories have been using Twitter and Facebook (where it is stronger) really well to organise “watch the debate parties”. Labour is hoping it can use Facebook to encourage supporters to invite friends to a Facebook event – ‘I’m Voting Labour on May 6′

This is good a one that all parties should be doing: if you’ve donated to Labour (or the party of your choice) then let people know via your status update.

Elsewhere some research from data marketing firm Alterian it revealed statistics analysing over 300,000 conversations across social media platforms, looking into sentiment analysis of the main political leaders before, during and following the live TV debates over the past two months.

It found that while Gordon Brown has consistently had the highest volume in overall conversations compared to Cameron and Clegg, over the last week, the volume of conversations has come to a head with all three parties getting an almost identical share of voice online.

Okay this was done before #bigotgate, but it revealed Brown had a higher influence among the older members of the public (23% of over 50’s) but he doesn’t speak “directly to younger members through micro blogging sites (only 14%)”.

It found Clegg has received the highest percentage of mentions through Twitter with 33% and Cameron 28%.

This is social media 101: Clegg is the only one of the three with his own Twitter feed with 29,007followers. That’s pretty good going. Clegg is bigger than his own party. On Facebook the story the story is even bigger for Clegg he now has 49,473 friends.

Twitter                                       Facebook

Conservatives 29,233       Conservatives 72, 270
Lib Dems 18,199                  Lib Dems 72, 421
Labour 15,688                     Labour Party 32, 088

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