The social media election that wasn't

So, this was the first social media election, the one where the likes of Twitter and Facebook would play a decisive part in deciding the outcome.

Was it heck.

If we learned one thing about social media during the General Election of 2015, it is that its status as a reflection of the world we live in needs a sizeable health warning.

All the major parties conducted formal and informal social media campaigns, ranging from targeted messages to reoccurring hashtags to Youtube videos.

Judging by the response on Twitter, some people took this very seriously indeed, acting as if their tweets were delivering decisive blows in an election ground-war.

The key phrase there was 'judging by the response'. Towards the end of the campaign, a bar chart appeared from the British Election Study (run by the universities of Nottingham, Manchester and Oxford) which suggested that those who believed Twitter was going to play a big part in the outcome might have got it wrong.

The BES chart showed the levels of social media activity of people who are actually committed to a particular political party - exactly the kind of people, you would have thought, who would be out there posting and tweeting until their fingers went numb. Yet the highest percentage of party supporters who were posting content on Twitter was 14% (for the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru). For Labour, it was was just 5%, for the Tories a paltry 2%.

In other words, a seeming torrent of political activity on Twitter may well have been coming from a comparatively small number of people. It follows that anyone who thought it represented either widespread endorsement or a surge of support was likely to be mistaken.

There were other strange decisions, too. Ed Miliband's appearance in a Youtube video with the comedian and polemicist Russell Brand looked quite smart: he took on someone popular, held his own, and reached a potential audience of 1.4 million followers.

Yet on closer analysis this doesn't seem so clever. Brand is a divisive figure, who people love or loathe, and one with a chequered history. It's quite possible, too, that those who love him are more sympathetic to the left of the political spectrum anyway. And I'd wager that a fair chunk of the people who watch him on Youtube may well be below voting age.

In other words, Ed's Youtube play may not have achieved anything.

This was a difficult election for Labour, one which raises all sorts of questions about its relationship with the electorate. It appeared very active on social media, both officially through MPs and party officials, and unofficially through supporters in the media, the arts and third sector organisations. Did it assume that all this activity represented a level of support and endorsement which we now know wasn't there? In other words, was it talking to itself on social media?

The traditional media complained on more than one occasion that they were being sidelined. At my paper, the Nottingham Post, we endured a pointless encounter with David Cameron while he visited the marginal constituency of Sherwood. His communications team said we could ask him three questions as long as we told them in advance what they were. You just have to play the game in these situations, and make the most of an opportunity to get in front of top politicians. But our time was wasted: we were given enough time with Mr Cameron to ask only one question and his answer contained nothing new. Other regional newspapers up and down the country had similar experiences, and there were those wondering what on earth a party which was ignoring newspapers and doing little on social media was up to.

We have some sense of the answer now. It was fighting a very targeted campaign in particular marginal constituencies and contacting voters directly by phone.

It won. Social media didn't.

My Editor is very fond of telling reporters time and again that "Twitter is not the real world". It isn't irrelevant and can be a very effective way for specific sectors to put across specific messages in a quick and effective way. Business should not ignore it because it's a great amplifier.

But is it an accurate, distortion-free mirror of the lives led by ordinary people? Or a goldfish bowl where a particularly active group of people talk largely to each other?

This may well have been an election in which social media played a part. But one part is all it was, and it may not have been the part some people thought.