Size is Everything? Comparing Parties on Social Media During the 2014 Swedish Election

While plenty of research has provided useful insights into political party use of Twitter, comparably few efforts have focused on the arguably more popular Facebook service. This paper presents a comparative approach, detailing similar functionalities on each platform and providing statistical analyses of the social media activities undertaken by political parties during the 2014 Swedish parliamentary elections. Moreover, the types of attention and feedback received by these parties are analyzed, suggesting that while sizeable parties are not necessarily the most ardent at using their social media presences, they do receive the most attention. While previous research has gauged party popularity on services like these by assessing numbers of “followers” or “fans”, the current paper favors measurements that more directly take into account the actual activity undertaken by those users who supposedly engage online on these platforms. As such, the paper makes an attempt to study the supply side of political communication – the messages offered by the parties – as well as the demand side – how these messages fare once communicated. The study largely complements previous research finding that while smaller political parties stand out in some regards when assessing activity levels, their larger competitors receive the bulk of attention on both studied platforms – albeit with some internal variation. However, the role of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats is clearly felt on both platforms, suggesting the apparent prowess of controversial parties in the online context. Overall, low-engagement type feedback such as “liking” a Facebook status emerge as more common than what could be considered as more demanding forms of interaction – such as commenting. As the former types of efforts are less important for campaign messages to “go viral”, suggestions of the supposed important role of social media for election purposes are taken into question.