Abstract
A party's Facebook audience is the base on which its reach and engagement rest, yet little is known about how such audiences grow. I track the number of page likes of 112 party pages and 74 party leaders' pages in 20 European countries month by month from 2016 to 2020, using the counts recorded with each post collected through CrowdTangle. The typical page grew by about half a per cent a month, and growth slowed from about 1.3% a month in 2016 to about 0.3% from 2018. Growth was concentrated around elections: compared with the same page in other months, and with other pages in the same calendar month, pages grew by about 3 log points (roughly 3%) more in the month before a national election and by about 5 more in the month of the election, several times the median monthly rate, but no faster in the month after. The month before and the month of an election made up 5% of page-months and 18% of growth. The European Parliament election of May 2019 added about 1.5 points. A change of party leader did not add followers to the party's page. Pages gained more followers in months when they received more engagement, holding constant how much they posted, while posting more without more engagement was not associated with extra growth. Leaders' pages and populist parties' pages grew faster, and larger pages more slowly. Followings grew several times faster around elections, though most cumulative growth still accrued, slowly, in ordinary months.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Building an Audience: What Drove Growth in the Facebook Followings of European Parties and Leaders, 2016 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23414624