Why our political parties are all over social media
Canadians on social media are more engaged in politics than other voters.
And social platforms — Facebook, Twitter and the like — allow political parties to target particular voting blocks, rally already-convinced troops, and test the effectiveness of campaign strategies.
That helps explain why political parties are relying heavily on the medium during the run-up to the Oct. 19 federal election.
On social media, a politician's main aim is not to convert but to mobilize.
“People say, ' Oh, people on social media are engaged and they're using it to try and figure out who they're going to vote for,' " said Mike Colledge, president of market-researcher Ipsos Reid Public Affairs Canada, which studies online behaviour.
“Not so much. They're actually going there as supporters of one camp or another and they're trying to confirm that the other guy's wrong. You don't have a lot of people shopping for a party.”
People who are on social sites are a lot more likely to have made up their mind, Colledge said. Fiftyeight per cent of people who are online daily talking social and political issues say they know who they're going to vote for, he said. That compares to 46 per cent for people who aren't on social daily.
Political parties "want their most ardent 10, 15 per cent of supporters to parrot their information and get it out to more like-minded people.
“If people who are engaged in social media are picking up messages and talking about them at cocktail parties, at the pub, around the table, that's a fantastic thing for political parties,” Colledge said. Friends and family are “by far the most reliable, trusted source” of information. Political parties once relied on television advertising to get messages out, but that's a scattershot approach.
“Now we see micro-targeting” on social media via posts and paid advertising, said Internet researcher Fenwick McKelvey, an associate communications-studies professor at Concordia University.
With social media, they can pinpoint segments of their supporters — targeting messages and getting feedback by age, gender, and region, for example.
“There’s a different dynamic about social media targeting, which is very precise because you have a better awareness of the audience.”
Instead of relying on outside firms to create a small number of broad-based ads, political parties typically have in-house production studios that can create a large number of videos that can be posted and then shared on social sites, McKelvey said.
Parties keep their online tactics close to their chests, but they all rely on sophisticated software that allows them “to understand who’s talking about them on social media and then link that back to a voter profile,” he said.
One way to track trends is to analyze what issues and words are most linked to individual leaders in social media posts, said Sandra D’Angelo, who is analyzing social media use by political parties for Nexalogy Environics, which helps businesses and political parties interpret what is being said about them on social media.
“So if you’re most attached to words like scandal, crisis, problem, troubles, it’s not looking good,” she said. “Whereas if you’re attached to words like solution, future, change, new, those things are more positive.”
Parties test political messages on social media to see what clicks.
“They can look for messages that get a spark, that people retweet, that people comment on, that get people engaged or enraged,” Colledge said.
They can look for messages that get a spark, that people retweet, that people comment on, that get people engaged or enraged.
“You can’t look at (social media activity) and say, ‘I can understand public opinion based on the comments on Twitter,’ but you can get an idea of the messages that may work with people in social media in the hopes that it trickles over into traditional media and the community.”
Social media isn’t representative of Canadian voters.
On Twitter, for example, urban dwellers and certain types of people — journalists, business people and artists, for example — are overrepresented, D’Angelo said. Socialmedia analysis is “a new science (and) we can’t really venture into” predicting election results, she added.
But “I think it’s particularly interesting to see what issues do float to the top” because they can give an indication of what the general population is thinking.
Social media analysis “always comes with certain caveats, but look at polling — it has been around way longer than Twitter and it still gets it wrong sometimes,” D’Angelo said. Approaches vary on social media. The accounts “differ a lot in their personalities,” D’Angelo said.
On Twitter, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s feed tends to be “cautious, more reserved, very professional,” while other candidates often take a more personal tone, she said.
Liberal Justin Trudeau’s account is often informal, with the leader, for example, tweeting about his canoe ride in advance of a recent debate.
“It’s not a political comment but his followers seem to really like it,” D’Angelo said.
NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair “is more the impassioned type” on Twitter, she noted. She pointed to his emotional response after a photo of the body of a drowned three-year-old Syrian refugee was published in early September.
As for the Green Party’s Elizabeth May, her active, lively Twitter feed allowed her to dominate the Twitter conversation during the Sept. 17 leaders’ debate, D’Angelo said.
“She was by far the most retweeted, by far the most mentioned and that’s pretty impressive for someone who wasn’t even at the debate.”