Your MP on Twitter: Ian Lavery

A study into the work of the country’s politicians looked at how active they were on the social media platform, including that of the Labour MP for Wansbeck.

Analysis of Ian Lavery's Twitter account (@IanLaveryMP) by Motive PR shows he had sent around 6,400 tweets between first joining the website on May 1 2011 and March 29 this year.

It means the 59-year-old sends an average of around 1.6 tweets per day – equating to 49 per month.

This account was created after Mr Lavery was elected to his seat on May 6 2010.

The average MP that has an account sends 3.5 tweets per day, but around one in 10 representatives did not have one at the time the research was done.

Fellow Labour MP Karl Turner is the most prolific Tweeter – sending an average of 26.1 per day for 12 years.

There were roughly 600 MPs with accounts which had sent almost 8 million tweets between them by the end of March.

But Motive said they found little correlation between the number of tweets and retweets an MP sent, and the number of followers they have.

Ian Lavery, who serves as a backbench MP, had around 92,000 followers by the end of March.

Of parties with at least 10 members, Labour was reaching the largest section of the electorate – with an average of 63,500 followers each.