Political Marketing: Impact of social media on voting behavior

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Marketing IntelligenceSocial media has become part of our daily routine. We scroll from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep, and we are overloaded with information on the most diverse subjects. Political parties are aware and are building election campaigns on political propaganda on every social media. Given the fact that we are exposed to massive amounts of information on our social media accounts every day, it becomes important to discover if this new type of advertisement is helping political candidates, by filling citizens’ feeds with news, quotes and marketing interventions, to gather more votes. This study aims to investigate the impact of social media on voting behavior, especially if people feel more engaged with political parties who are more present on social media. In order to reach better conclusions, an experimental research was conducted with 101 social media users, with age above 18. For the analysis, we used SPSS 27.0. The results showed a significant positive relationship between social media and voting behavior, demonstrating that citizens’ who vote regularly are in some way influenced not only by the things candidates posts online, but also by the millions of opinions spread every day on influencers’ accounts. Given this, we can say that political parties can benefit from a good political propaganda on social media - people are getting more and more interested in politics, when it’s appealing