Go Viral on Facebook! Interactions between Candidates and Followers on Facebook in the 2014 Hungarian General Election Campaign

We have extensive knowledge of the way politicians use social media, but as of yet, only few attempts have been made to analyze the two-way interactions between politicians and citizens. In the web 2.0 environment, citizens’ reactions are integral element of the posted content. Politicians not only communicate with their immediate followers, but they can reach other users through their followers’ engagement. Despite the fact that there are some widely-followed politicians on Facebook, most politicians have relatively few followers and just a very small proportion of users actually follow political pages. That’s why the importance of this small number of followers’ online engagement is increasing. This interactional element of examining political communication on Facebook seems to be underexplored. This research examines Facebook posts of candidates running in the parliamentary elections in the 2014 Hungarian general elections. I try to establish what types of content can trigger the most reactions from the followers. The Facebook posts of the candidates are the unit of analysis. The number of likes, comments and shares of the posts are the dependent variables. I’ll examine the effect of the appearance (contains text, picture, video or emoticon), the content (informative, personalized, interactive, opinion-telling) the sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) of the posts. I hypothetize that picture, video, emoticon and the personalized or opinion-telling contents as well as the negative tone have a positive effect on the dependent variables. In addition I examine the effect of humor on the dependents variables, since I believe that that humorous content is more successful among users, given the entertainment-oriented nature of Facebook. In the analysis some candidate-level features (number of followers, party affiliation, incumbency) are used as control variables.