Since The PM called the election there have been two hashtags vying for dominance in political twitter feeds. #GE2017 was the natural evolution of #GE2015 the popular tag from last time round. However the lighter, more efficient #GE17 was getting almost as much use. The wisdom of crowds suggesting that the world was ready for a lean, mean version.

Earlier today however Twitter effectively killed off the shorter version rolling out a Twitter emoji for the election .

A Twitter emoji appears when a hashtag generates an icon created by Twitter. It may be a national flag or another small image created for a major event. #GE2017 generates the emoji as does #GeneralElection but #GE17.

Farewell then, #GE17. You burned brightly but were very brief.

There has never been a closer election in the history of the UK and in the first past the post  constituency system there is every chance that your vote will count for nothing.

There is much talk of tactical voting especially in Scotland where there is usually just one real alternative to voting SNP in each constituency.  The UK sytem can lead to a strong sense that if the party you support isn’t popular in your constituency there is little point in voting.

A new platform called Swap My Vote offers a potential a way to make your vote count.  The Swap my Vote platform helps pair voters who want to swap, each casting each other’s preferred vote in a constituency where where it could really count.  Swap my Vote introduces two individuals to each other and the ballot stays secret.  You are responsible for trusting your partner.

This isn’t totally new. Pairing takes place in the House  of Commons, where a member who can’t attend, say for health reasons, pairs with an MP on the opposite bench, to cancel out each others vote.  In the USA vote swapping was found by the Supreme Court to be protected speech under the First Amendment.

In the 2010 election, an average of just 29% of votes cast gave a candidate victory and over half of votes were for losing candidates. In a sense 70% of votes were ‘wasted’. There’s no way of knowing how many voters will take up the offer and what the level of trust will be but it’s nothing if not an ingenious attempt to deal with the concept of ‘wasted votes’.

David Cameron has nearly 150,000 fake followers on Twitter,  around 15% of the total, according to an article in the Daily Mirror yesterday. We are told that Nadine Dorries and William Hague have an even great percentage of bogus tweeters following their accounts.

How much actual research did The Mirror do to establish these numbers? Well not much actually, they used just one tool Status People’s Fakers App. They themselves say “our scores are relatively accurate for larger Twitter Accounts”.  Hardly conclusive then.

Take a closer look at the Mirror story and it’s clear that they’re not sure either.  The article says “15% of them appear to be fake”, “MPs most likely to have “fake” followers”, “21% of their followers apparently being fake”.  There are more caveats here than in a Hollywood pre-nup.

That said, Twitter is absolutely full of fake accounts, so here at Ballot Blogs we decided to check how many fake followers The Daily Mirror has.  We used three tools TwitterAudit, Social Bakers Fake Followers and the Fakers App used by The Mirror. The results were startling. Twitter Audit said The Mirror had 39.6% fake followers,  Social Bakers put it higher at 41%, Fakers App said 16% Fake and 48% inactive.  It seems @DailyMirror has more fake followers than the prime minister or indeed any of the politicians in their league of shame.

Twitter stole a march on social media rivals when it announced yesterday that ads and promoted tweets will be able to be geo-targeted down to individual postcodes for the first time.  Facebook can target towns and cities but not streets or significantly in the run up to the election, individual constituencies.

For political parties fighting at constituency level, where the race to win a seat is likely to be close, targeting by postcode could prove to be a powerful weapon in the digital armoury.

Postcode targeting gives candidates an opportunity to push policy on local issues or raise the profile of a candidate fighting for a seat for the first time.

The ability to target audiences at hyper local level is added to existing options that include interest, gender and keyword targeting.

In an election that will be fought hard with more battleground constituencies than ever before this could give candidates with skilled digital advisors a real advantage.