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Brexit: Leave groups reach on social media greater than Remain rivals

The Brexit campaign has been intense on social media
The Brexit campaign has been intense on social media The Brexit campaign has been intense on social media

The Leave campaign is enjoying a greater reach on social media than its rivals in Remain, new figures suggest.

In the 50 days since the official start of the referendum campaign, Vote Leave has grown its presence on Twitter and Facebook faster than Britain Stronger In Europe - though the positions are reversed when measuring activity on YouTube.

The Press Association has analysed the performance of both the Remain and Leave organisations across social media since the campaign formally began on April 15.

On Twitter, Vote Leave has added almost 16,000 followers since the start of the campaign, compared with just over 10,000 for Stronger In Europe.

Vote Leave also has more followers in total - nearly 50,000 - while Stronger In Europe has nearly 33,000.

Stronger In Europe has been more active on Twitter, however, tweeting roughly 30 times a day in the past 50 days, compared with around 20 times a day for Vote Leave.

On Facebook, Vote Leave's official page has had almost 125,000 likes since the campaign began, while the page for Stronger In Europe has received just under 100,000.

Vote Leave has also regularly outranked Stronger In Europe when measuring the number of "people talking about" their respective pages. In some weeks the average total for Leave has been over twice that for Remain. Leave's average number of "new page likes" has now beaten the figure for Remain four weeks in a row.

At the time of writing, both campaigns have almost the same number of total Facebook likes - 449,000 for Stronger In Europe and 446,000 for Vote Leave.

On YouTube the Remain campaign has a big lead over its rival. The Stronger In Europe page has received 4.6 million views since the start of the campaign, compared with just 0.7 million for the Vote Leave page.

Stronger In Europe also displays publicly the number of subscribers it has on YouTube - almost 3,000 - while Vote Leave does not.

Stronger In Europe has posted 54 videos during the campaign so far, the most viewed being "What experts say Brexit could mean for you". At the time of writing this has received almost 870,000 views.

By contrast Vote Leave has published 12 videos on its YouTube page over the same period. The most viewed so far is "How would you spend £350 million?" - the amount the Leave side claims the UK sends to the EU every week. This video has been viewed almost 219,000 times.