Page 4 - Barrow Town Deal Board Agenda 14/4/2020

Barrow Town Investment Plan - Stakeholder Insight Report

Table 2.1 Breakdown of Social Media Activity Related to Barrow-in-Furness
Sentiment Share of Total Activity Number of Hits
Negative 28.6% 3,437
Neutral 61.6% 7,393
Not Rated 2.0% 236
Positive 7.8% 937
Data source: Meltwater AI

2.4 Delving deeper into the composition of positive and negative sentiment online activity
concerning Barrow, the word clouds below illustrate the most frequent terms in posts of the
Positive (Figure 1.3) and Negative (Figure 2.3) sentiment categories.

2.5 Positive activity concerning Barrow frequently references music, football, and the local
community. Business, the town centre, industry and engineering are also frequently cited
in positive posts.
Figure 2.3 Most Frequent Words Appearing in ‘Positive’ Social Media Activity relating to
Barrow

Data source: Meltwater AI

2.6 Activity of a negative sentiment concerning Barrow frequently references politics and
individual politicians. To avoid emphasis on individuals, we have removed the names of
politicians from the word cloud, but left all other references to politics in. Both the
Conservatives and Labour are frequently cited in negative posts, as well as Brexit and the
EU, reflecting the polarity of the electorate in Barrow.

3