Facebook Functions and Communication Strategies of Political Parties in a Context of Mediatization 2.0
Alda Magalhães Telles and Jorge Martins Rosa
XII SopCom Congress («Communication and Disruption»), thematic session «Political Disruption III: Digital Politics», Lisbon, April 12, 2022. Proceedings in print.
To gauge the strategic use of Facebook as an electoral campaign tool, we draw on four main dimensions to understand the motivations and practices of political strategists on this social network: interactivity, engagement, personalization and professionalization. We empirically validate this corpus of analysis with data from two primary sources: interviews with the communication managers of eight of the ten political parties with parliamentary representation in October 2019 and an online survey.
The results show that 1) Facebook’s main function is the dissemination of political proposals and mobilization; 2) A low level of personalization is especially obvious for parliamentary elections and not all parties manage personalization in the same way; 3) Interaction is seen as an important possibility of Facebook; 4) A mature degree of professionalization is identified in the communication of all parties. Moreover, the campaigns operated in a hypermedia logic where contents are disseminated through direct, indirect, traditional, and “new” media. Television is still seen as the most important media platform in electoral campaigns, but social networks, with Facebook leading the way, have second prio