Are any of the minor candidates in the London Mayoral election heading for a breakthrough?

When the electorate decide who shall occupy London's City Hall on 3rd May we can be as certain as you can be that it'll either be Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone. But these are politicians from the 2 main political parties and we all know how popular they are! With the Bradford West by-election sending back to parliament some bearded bloke who goes on and on about the Middle East, is there a sign of a breakthrough for the minor candidates? Lets look at the evidence from Twitter.

Using R with the packages TwitteR, plyr and ggplot2 and some code bunged together from earlier posts I've got tweets mentioning the minor candidates for London Mayor by name. It's limited to 1500 mentions so if anyone feels like buying me access to the whole twitter hosepipe feel free!

1) The short answer to the question is no.

2) The highest point on all the graphs is when the Newsnight debate took place between Ken, Boris, Brian and Jenny. The other minor candidates got very small vox pop at the start but were totally excluded from the debate which accounts for their peaks.

3) Jenny Jones the Green candidate and supposedly the smallest of the "Big" four parties that were allowed to take part in the debate got more mentions than the Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick. Given the national poll ratings for the Lib Dems on the basis of Twitter he should be more worried about coming 4th than 2nd

4) The BNP candidate did get 200 mentions overall but they were practically all ones laughing at the idea someone with such a foreign sounding name is standing for the BNP. If the far right are going to take advantage of these economically troubled times they wont be doing it in this election for London Mayor.

5) The Independent Siobhan Benita is getting more tweets than the BNP and UKIP combined though that is not a great claim to make. Her tweets are actually rather positive and I think she'll capitalise on the public's negativity towards party politics. She'll get a good amount of first preferance votes and may not even come last which for an Independent in an election for the London Mayoralty is a great achievement.

6) UKIP has actually been polling rather well nationally but it's candidate for London Mayor one Lawrence Webb, no me neither, is nowhere. Getting less than 50 Twitter mentions some of which aren't actually about this Lawrence Webb is a woeful performance and many of the others just list his name as one of the people standing.