Australian grandmother Lesley Dewar is an unlikely political pundit, but 12,350 people follow her every 140-character utterance.

The retired financial planner, 66, began using micro-blogging site Twitter two years ago, and the prolific pensioner is now ranked among the top 100 most influential Tweeters in Australia’s 2010 election campaign.

Her closest competitors are political journalists and news sites, the ruling Labour party, Members of Parliament and The Economist magazine, according to the BuzzElection media monitoring site.

“I took to it like a duck to water,” Mrs Dewar said of her more than 41,000 tweets.

“The thing I absolutely love about Twitter is that you can actually talk to people all over the world on an enormous range of topics.”

Mrs Dewar is one of Australia’s one million Tweeters and nine million Facebook users who turn to social media to let off steam on issues that engage or enrage – near cyber-saturation for a population of just 22 million.

But are the leaders – Labour’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her conservative opponent Tony Abbott – listening?

Labour took to the Internet with fervour during the 2007 election, using YouTube and other online tools to muster support for the first time in Australian political history.

But rather than capitalise on the momentum and extend their reach into new platforms like Twitter, both parties are retreating from the internet in a bid to stay on message and limit their exposure to criticism, analysts say.

“I think that both parties have adopted this small target strategy,” said expert Axel Bruns from the Queensland University of Technology.

“We saw some interesting use of YouTube for videos (in 2007). And the Labour Party in particular used it to show that they’re more modern than the Liberals. This election it seems to have had less of an impact,” Mr Bruns said.

The public broadcaster, ABC, has for the first time included social media tracking – what people are saying about the election and how popular the leaders and parties are – in its “Campaign Pulse” election monitoring site (campaignpulse.abc.net.au).

It also has a live Twitter feed into its popular Q&A television debate programme where viewers can ask politicians questions and vent their spleen on the issues.

An ABC spokeswoman said the broadcaster wanted to tap into the growing popularity of social media in Australia and engage with the grassroots democracy it offered.

“It gives people a place to be involved, and not just leave it to the experts,” she said.