Recently I watched a political video on youtube and read the following comment:
“I’m 22, Young people spend hours a day on Facebook, Myspace, Youtube etc… This should be on the front of all popular networking sites, youtube and all over the internet… this video only has 4566 after a month online! More campaign money should be spent on online advertising to get your message across! everybody is tired of bits of paper through the door and along with the pizza menu and an unwanted newspaper… Hope you do well in the election!”
This made me think about social media and the up and coming election so I asked our Cowan Group social media expert to do some digging, here are his findings…
Last election more people didn’t vote than voted for the winning party (approximately 26 Million voted)… So what are the political parties doing to change this and get everyone voting?
In light of Facebook’s recent announcement to encourage young British people to vote in the UK elections, (see here) we wondered what the political parties themselves are doing with social media to communicate with the 23 million active UK users of Facebook, and millions of other users on social sites such as youtube and twitter.
According to recent statistics (updated today) Facebook and Youtube are the fifth and third most popular websites in the world and Facebook currently accounts for over half of all visits to social networking sites in the UK with YouTube at second with over 17% of visits.
So why isn’t “more campaign money being spent on online advertising”?
Well how much is being spent?
Last year the Guardian reported that “The COI, the largest advertiser in the UK, co-ordinates the government’s £540m annual marketing and communications spend [and] the COI spent more than £270m on advertising and digital marketing in the year to March”
So with all this money being pumped into the advertising campaigns, which include digital marketing how have the parties got on? Let’s see some recent stats on their social media pages:
LibDem
– 12,004 Followers on Twitter
- 16,569 Fans on Facebook
- 97,807 Channel Views on Youtube
Conservatives
- 25,485 Followers on Twitter
- 39,403 Fans on Facebook
- 207,083 Channel Views on Youtube
Labour
- 13,761 Followers on Twitter
- 18,406 Fans on Facebook
- 263,712 Channel Views on Youtube
Not bad you might say but bearing in mind the statistics we’ve seen about users of social media, it seems that comparatively not that many people have been inspired to get involved in supporting their party online…
By way of comparison President Obama, with a strong social media team amassed an impressive 8 Million fans on Facebook, 3.6 Million followers on Twitter and 22 Million channel views on Youtube.
With no UK political party yet to break the ‘One Million Mark’ on any social site perhaps the focus hasn’t been in the right place? Maybe too much time spent waging SEO war?
Or perhaps the politicians are a little too apprehensive about exposing themselves to the uncensored responses online publishing illicits? It’s not hard to blame them when the media is tracking their every post and comment, waiting for a social media scandal – many of which we have already seen and many of which I am sure are still to come! (*update – latest social media scandal)
Either way it seems strange that while the Conservatives promise to give Britain the fastest broadband in Europe if they are elected (see article) they seem to have attracted an online fan base of only a quarter of the number of people who voted for them in the last election…
It’s becoming politics 2.0 – with more media and information being accessible to more people than ever before. For example, type in your postcode on this site to find out how your local MP voted on key issues – technology is changing the way politicians behave and it is becoming more difficult for tricky issues or contentious opinions to be swept under the rug as accessibility both to information and to the individuals themselves is now attainable to anyone with a computer or Smartphone.
Perhaps the upcoming online Q&A (which will see a partnership between Facebook and Youtube) will drive further online engagement for the parties:
Facebook and YouTube users to grill party leaders
And at the end of it all, will the Facebook fans, Twitter followers and Youtube subscribers convert into, what us marketing agencies would equate to sales – votes?!
We shall see…
This is really interesting. Obviously the political parties are trying to align their campaign efforts with new digital technology to try to get access to a younger generation of potential voters…and interestingly, according to the stats anyway, the Conservatives seem to be the best at it!
In the run-up to elections, the campaign fights between political parties always seem to get very petty. Perhaps by broadcasting everything so readily on social network sites, they will hopefully realise (or be made aware) that a smear campaign against the opposition is not the way forward and we’d much rather hear what they would do to make the country better.
Social Politicking via the web is a MUST these days. Obama showed us they way here in the States how to use Facebook, MySpace and YouTube to implement ans sustain a (pseudo) grass roots movement via the web and now with corporations here in America free to openly spend on campaigns I can see social media only going to the next level when it comes to political campaigns (digital advertising, multi-channel campaigns).
Hi Marcel,
Working previously at Fleishman-Hillard London’s digital department and dealing with many political and royalty connected stakeholders I learnt quite fast how Social Media Marketing and Politics in the UK didn’t quite like the idea of Social Media only a couple of years ago. Now I find with the advent of the ‘Obama’ sensation and seeing how even the negative sentiments online had adverse and large swings for their campaign in the USA winning the election. You can now see the shift of politicians having twitter and facebook fan pages with some PR companies managing their profile and updates (not all may I add). With digital now being such a ‘door opener’ and of which can be very targeted the UK political seen has been slow to adopt and this is mainly due to that as you know Social Media Marketing SMM is a medium that cannot be controlled and this has been the one inhibitor political parties do not like. I believe with the right Online PR and online monitoring and auditing strategy an effective SMM program can highly influence voters and online sentiment, as well as a wider audience. The key point you need to take home with politics is that not everyone is connected to the internet (just take a look at the Bureau of UK statistics on internet household connection) so Direct Mail DM and other forms of ATL advertising is still needed in the integrated marketing and communications plan to ensure you capture all constituencies and audiences…well, that’s my two cents.
Cheers,
Daniel Easterbrook
Good article.
While you are right in that the official twitters have a relatively low following, some political figures, such as Gordon Brown’s wife on http://twitter.com/sarahbrown10 have loads more followers.
Sarah Brown as it stands to day have 1,118,191 followers and what is more interesting is that I actually think her twitter stream is worth following and it seems a lot of people think so too.
On the other hand I find David Miliband’s twitter rather good as well but it only has some 12k followers http://twitter.com/DMiliband which is somehwat lower than mrs Brown’s