Pics or It Didn’t Happen - Visual Communication Strategies of EU Institutions on Social Media

The European Union is repeatedly found to suffer from a participation deficit, perceived as far away from people’s lives, giving them little room for directly experiencing European politics. Social media were welcomed as a direct way to communicate to European publics, circumventing the gatekeeping function of the mass media, giving EU institutions greater agenda-setting power. Social media affordances as well as direct engagement of users in terms of liking, sharing, or communicating in the comment section influence communication on social media. Moreover, social media often follow a visual logic found to increase engagement, as images are more likely to attract attention and present information on a holistic-associative basis. Our study is the first to undertake a multimodal analysis of EU communication comparing Facebook and Instagram regarding visual and textual contents as well as user engagement with these contents over the last 10 years. (1) We employ an image-type analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative features of visual analysis: First, a sub-sample of posts is inductively analysed to identify recurring image types, subsequently used to implement a manual quantitative visual content analysis. Building on the results, (2) we implement a machine learning approach to scale up the analysis, allowing us to analyse 46,467 posts, including more than 20,000 pictures. Our study contributes to a growing body of literature focusing on the challenges of visual content analysis. We also enhance the still underdeveloped debate about the distinct affordances of and user interaction on different social media platforms. Finally, our analysis adds to the ongoing discussion about the EU’s democratic deficit, also informing EU public relations practitioners regarding viable strategies to increase user interaction with their contents.