Data shows EFF ahead of DA, ANC
The EFF has a stronger online presence than the ANC and Democratic Alliance
Voters’ sentiments are gradually declining online when it comes to the ANC and the Democratic Alliance, while that towards the Economic Freedom Fighters has become increasingly positive, according to a digital expert.
The reason for this is political parties are using old marketing models to reach voters, thereby limiting their ability to control messaging, according to Carmen Murray, the founder of modern marketing business Boo-yah.
Murray, who uses Meltwater analytics to measure party performance online, said political parties should start to acquaint themselves with more modern systems to gauge voter confidence in real time, including Netnography, which helps the user understand people’s online behaviour.
Murray, who focused on the three biggest parties for this year’s local government election, said ANC President Cyril Ramaphosa was not transparent on social media.
Ramaphosa, unlike his predecessor, Jacob Zuma, “comes across as guarded”. She says South Africans are searching online to know more about their president.
“He is not following world leaders, the ANC youth leagues and even municipalities, in comparison to Zuma who follows over 500 people. Zuma follows all of the municipalities, his wives and even soccer players. This gives you an idea of his interests. Zuma is transparent about who he is as a person whereas Ramaphosa comes across as guarded and not wanting to show his alliances.”
Ramaphosa has two million Twitter followers, but follows only eight accounts. Murray believes this indicates he is out of touch with South Africans, particularly the youth.
“So does he really have his finger on the pulse? What comes across is that he does a lot of shouting out
from his account but not a lot of engagement.”
Murray also said the data showed positive sentiment towards the ANC is at 9.45% and negative sentiment is 24.76%. Those neutral towards the governing party stands at 65.7%.
The DA’S Phoenix poster scandal, which dominated social media conversations and led to the party’s Kwazulu-natal chairperson Dean Macpherson’s public apology, has harmed the blue party significantly, according to Murray’s analysis of the data. At 33.8%, the DA now sits with the highest negativity sentiment for the local government elections.
“What is concerning for the DA is that they are sitting with the lowest neutrality of 59%. That is telling me that people who have been keeping quiet have now all of sudden gone, ‘no, I’m sorry I’m not in agreement’. Their positivity was high before the posters, at over 11.5%, but now it’s sitting at 6.5%. The DA is becoming very unpopular,” according to Murray’s interpretation.
She said online users have in recent times shown curiosity about the EFF’S donors, following the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s (IEC) funding report revealing that the red berets had not declared any funders
in accordance with the Political Party Funding Act. Despite this, voters’ online sentiment towards the EFF was still positive.
Positive sentiment for the EFF is almost 8%, close to that of the ANC, while negative sentiment, at 15.37%, is lower than that of the DA and ANC.
“Data shows that the ANC and DA, which used to be the two leading parties, are sitting with the highest negativity sentiment in South Africa. When you look at the EFF on social media, it has more Twitter followers than the DA and ANC, and it also dominates on Facebook,” said Murray.
“What this shows is that the EFF is closely watched, but the EFF is by far the most popular party on social media. They are gauging the youth far better than the other parties. The DA is more focused on corruption, but the youth does not seem to be much of an area of priority in their manifesto,” said Murray.
She argues that political parties need to start taking Netnography seriously, because it can help organisations understand consumer behaviour with better accuracy than a focus group survey.
“When you work with
Netnography, it’s what is happening now, it’s the eye of the storm. You can constantly see where people’s behaviour is shaping.
“Parties are still using old school marketing models, where they are listening to people on the ground but not what people say about them when they are not in the room.
“The big concern is that parties don’t have an understanding of the tsunami of conversations that are happening on various social media channels and online.”
Murray’s data shows that the three major parties are the most likely to be at risk of voter apathy. She added that the youth unemployment rate and the mental health problems caused by the Covid-19 lockdown regulations are also telltale signs of voter turnout in these elections.
“The youth feel that all that these politicians are doing is barking at each other; ‘it’s all about them, it’s not about us’. What is lost is what democracy means for the youth. They don’t understand that this takes away from their democracy if they don’t vote.”
She said the data shows that the big concern among the youth in the local government elections is job creation, which they feel politicians speak about generically, but with no practical plans to solve the economic crisis.
“The fourth industrial revolution continues to be thrown around like a magic word, but how can we do it when we have the biggest digital divide in the world, when people do not have internet in townships? How do people learn how to be online and navigate online?” asked Murray.
She said one of the big things to remember is that new voters number under 500 000 and are mostly the youth, “but you see little traffic going to the IEC website to find out who to vote for. That traffic is concerning.”
According to Murray’s research, the IEC website received only 6777 visits from people searching for their ward councillors during this campaign season, which indicates voter apathy. She added that one of the most searched pages on the IEC website was its jobs page.
“Voter information centre is at 10 777 visits. Now, this becomes more complicated because where are people getting their information? It means it’s by word of mouth or through rallies.” This, she says, is concerning, given that South Africa ranks fourth on the list of country concerned about misinformation online.
“Where this becomes a problem is that answers to people’s questions on government policies, job creation and the fourth industrial revolution only come from the public.”
The Statistics South Africa quarterly labour survey, released in August, said that more than four in every 10 young people aged 15 to 34 were not in employment, education or training.
The country added more than half a million workers to its unemployed labour force, which now consists of 7.8-million people.
The 34.4% unemployment rate, up from 32.6% in the first quarter, is the highest since the start of the survey in 2008.
The unemployment rate according to the expanded definition — which counts economically inactive people still looking for work as well as discouraged work seekers — increased by 1.2 percentage points to 44.4% in the second quarter of 2021 compared with the previous three months. The number of discouraged work seekers increased by 186000, according to the Stats SA.