Graham Jones has been ranked as one of the UK’s top parliamentary tweeters.
The Hyndburn MP is one of 436 MPs who use the social media site Twitter to interact with constituents, and currently has more than 3,000 followers.
Mr Jones’ most popular tweet received 1,186 ‘retweets’ - message shares from his followers with other Twitter users.
That placed him 20th in the MP Twitter league table, just behind Chancellor George Osborne.
Mr Jones said: “The times are definitely changing and Twitter is a simple and very concise way of reaching people.
“It’s just a very good way of highlighting the work you are doing in the constituency and Parliament.
“It is also a good way of publicising what community groups are doing in the area. However I don’t tend to get into conversations with people on there as I would prefer to exchange via email.”
Mr Jones said that while the social media site was a good platform for exchange he did raise concerns about the level of abuse MPs sometimes receive on the site.
He added: “There are some serious issues with social media.
“One thing that can be bad is people can be very abusive on there and there have been several cases of MPs reporting people to the police.
“It’s not right that when some people don’t agree with you they use the most abusive and foul language. “People need to behave responsibly, you don’t want to hear the vile diatribe of some troll.”
The MP’s most popular tweet was, perhaps unsurprisingly, about football, specifically on the sacking of Steve Kean from
Blackburn Rovers in 2012.
The MP who achieved the most retweets for a single tweet was Ed Balls.
The majority of MPs’ most popular tweets - 234 out of 436 - were about party-political issues.
A further 140 highlighted broader social issues.
Fifty-seven were personal, four were jokes and one a simple ‘twitter fail’ by Mr Balls, who mistakenly tweeted his own name, thinking it was a search, to gain an astonishing 28,893 retweets.
