Campaigning on Twitter: Towards the “Personal Style” Campaign to Activate the Political Engagement During the 2011 Spanish General Elections

Los políticos han adoptado y potenciado rápidamente los social media para conectar con los votantes. En concreto, Twitter ayuda a los candidatos a escuchar activamente a los ciudadanos a través de una conversación directa con ellos, y permite un estilo personal de campaña, con un discurso humanizado y alejado de lo institucional. Este artículo pretende conocer hasta qué punto se utilizó esta estrategia personal en la campaña de Twitter de los candidatos de los dos principales partidos a las elecciones generales de 2011 en España. Para ello se ha diseñado un análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo sobre 2.274 tweets publicados por las cuentas de ambos: @conRubalcaba y @marianorajoy.Politicians have been quick to adopt and leverage social media to engage voters. Micro-blogging on Twitter is a campaign tool that helps a political candidate directly interact with citizens through a shared conversation. It also allows the candidate to use a personal campaigning style based on a more everyday (versus an institutionalized) style of speech. The aim of this article is to analyse the extent to which the candidates for the presidency of the two leading parties in Spain deployed this personal strategy on Twitter during 2011 General-Election campaign. In order to achieve our goal, we have designed and used a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 2.274 tweets put out by both candidates’ accounts: @conRubalcaba and @marianorajoy

Campaigning on Twitter: Towards the “Personal Style” Campaign to Activate the Political Engagement During the 2011 Spanish General Elections

Los políticos han adoptado y potenciado rápidamente los social media para conectar con los votantes. En concreto, Twitter ayuda a los candidatos a escuchar activamente a los ciudadanos a través de una conversación directa con ellos, y permite un estilo personal de campaña, con un discurso humanizado y alejado de lo institucional. Este artículo pretende conocer hasta qué punto se utilizó esta estrategia personal en la campaña de Twitter de los candidatos de los dos principales partidos a las elecciones generales de 2011 en España. Para ello se ha diseñado un análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo sobre 2.274 tweets publicados por las cuentas de ambos: @conRubalcaba y @marianorajoy.Politicians have been quick to adopt and leverage social media to engage voters. Micro-blogging on Twitter is a campaign tool that helps a political candidate directly interact with citizens through a shared conversation. It also allows the candidate to use a personal campaigning style based on a more everyday (versus an institutionalized) style of speech. The aim of this article is to analyse the extent to which the candidates for the presidency of the two leading parties in Spain deployed this personal strategy on Twitter during 2011 General-Election campaign. In order to achieve our goal, we have designed and used a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the 2.274 tweets put out by both candidates’ accounts: @conRubalcaba and @marianorajoy

Facebook affordances and citizen engagement during elections: European political parties and their benefit from online strategies?

This paper examines how Facebook is used by political parties during elections to extend or accelerate their reach within the electorate and how successful these efforts are. Specifically, we compare the content and style of parties’ Facebook posts during the 2014 European parliament elections, and how this affects followers’ responses in terms of liking, sharing and commenting on the posts. Our findings reveal while that the timing and visual content of posts are important in increasing voters’ attention, interactivity matters most. Responsive party posts on Facebooks are significantly more likely to be shared, liked, and commented on by users. Given that follower reactions, particularly sharing, helps to increase the visibility of party communication through indirect or two-step flow communication (online and offline), these findings are important in advancing our understanding of how and why social media campaigns are able to influence voters and thus affect election outcomes. For parties themselves the results provide some useful insights into what makes for an ‘effective’ Facebook campaign in terms of how they can accelerate the reach of their communication