The 2017 federal election launched the first digital election campaign in many parts of the world. The parties planned, segmented, communicated and experimented with new digital formats. With digital science and with Data Engineer Skill Set, it can be ruled out that parties who used digital campaigns during the election have had a greater chance of reaching a wider audience.

How Social Media Strategy Changed Election Campaigns

Digital tools do not change the election campaign, but they strengthen the possibilities of political campaigns. It is much easier and faster for citizens to donate, search for information or get in touch. Content niches and detailed political interests find their place just as much as a network offers on social platforms.

Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram open up new opportunities for citizens, parties, and campaigns to express themselves politically and to share their content with the whole world, friends or neighbors. Party members and volunteers can network, they may use voters’ databases, use an app to collect new information when speaking to citizens, which then feed the results back into the campaign databases.

Four Key Functions that Determine the Success of Political Campaigns

• Information function. Political decision-making can only succeed through continuous information to the electorate. This makes your own point of view clear, the positions of the competitors visible and the digital image built up.
• Networking function. A yardstick for the dynamics of the campaign is a growing number of fans and followers on different platforms. This shows networking strength and dynamics.
• Participation function. Participation measures how users perceive political communication efforts. Is there a like or a reaction? Indeed, many political campaigns received as much like, comments, and various reactions to their posts. So whether it be a good or bad reaction, it is still a point that helps parties get noticed.
• Mobilization function. For campaigners, the resulting engagement of their initiatives is particularly important in order to measure how far their content went and how many followers and fans disseminated the content. The use of various content by political parties gave rise to the code of conduct in digital campaigning.
• Digital performance. It is quite easy to compare the performance of the parties using the four functions of information, networking, participation, and mobilization on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and email during the period of election. Data engineers can easily collect data and tell who among the parties have the edge during an election. While it is a rough estimate based on digital data, the results can still be a reliable basis.

In their digital campaign efforts, political campaigns strive for four key success functions that create more information about politics that can be found, allow political participation through likes or views, deepen networking with supporters and enable direct mobilization and active involvement of voters.

Comparing the activities of the parties on the basis of the information, networking, participation, and mobilization on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and via email in the closer campaign phase, gives interesting insights. In the election campaigns of 2017, there were great similarities between parties, however, there were differences in the selection of their platforms and their focus on different success functions.