The Suffolk-based founders of social media tool BirdSong have unveiled a new political analysis “hub” to track the fortunes of Britain’s major parties as the General Election campaign gathers pace.

It will provide daily statistics for the key parties on Twitter and Facebook, revealing the winners and losers in the social media battle and highlighting the most popular tweets each day.

The aim is to identify which parties are best at engaging on social media – the Green Party is now said to be the third most popular party on Twitter, having overtaken UKIP and the Lib Dems – and to show who is gaining or losing support.

On Facebook, BirdSong will rank the major parties by fan base and by engagement. Fan size will help identify the parties with the biggest audience but engagement will show which parties, and which messages, are resonating most with their fan bases.

BirdSong will also be tracking the followers of more than 450 politicians updating the counts daily in a bid to identify the most and least socially engaged politicians.

Jamie Riddell, co-founder of BirdSong Analytics, believes the General Election is the perfect opportunity to put the company’s tool to the test.

“A large percentage of social media users don’t say anything on Twitter so relying on sentiment analysis only provides part of the picture,” he said. “By tracking the real numbers of fans and engagement, we will have a live barometer of what people are doing as a result of the parties’ social presence.

“When it comes to something as big as the General Election, we have the perfect landscape in which to assess how voters are thinking and what they are doing in the social media arena, who they’re following – and who they’re not.

“BirdSong’s primary aim has always been to provide data which has tangible benefit as well as delivering insights which satisfy human curiosity. We will see those goals met with this new ‘hub’.”

BirdSong, which was founded in 2011, has customers in more than 100 countries and serves more than 5,000 users with pay as you go analytics across a wide range of accounts, industries and interests.

The General Election hub – which can be found at www.birdsonganalytics.com/election-2015/ – will automatically update the numbers nightly to ensure that the latest data is available every morning.

Mr Riddell added: “We believe this is the first comprehensive tracking hub for the 2015 General Election and it absolutely sets out what BirdSong is capable of.

“We’re looking forward to hearing from parties, pundits, agencies, marketers, journalists and politicians themselves, regarding their views on its analytic capabilities.”