Do populist parties do better on Facebook?
Yes, in most of Europe. In my study of 669,760 posts from 112 official party pages in 17 European countries between 2010 and 2020, a typical post by a populist party received about 2.5 times as many likes, comments, shares and reactions as a post by another party of the same size and government status.
What is a satellite campaign?
A satellite campaign is an organisation that campaigns for a party without being part of it. The best-known British example is Momentum, formed to support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party. On Facebook in 2017 it did a different job from Labour's own pages: instead of asking for votes, it asked people to campaign.
On Facebook, do party leaders or party pages matter more?
They do different jobs, and how much of a party's audience the leader carries varies hugely. In British general elections the party page was the campaign machine and the leader's page was the personal voice. Across 2010 to 2020, some leaders drew most of their party's Facebook engagement and others drew a quarter or less.
Can Facebook engagement predict elections?
Not well. In my work on Britain, Scandinavia and the United States, Facebook engagement tracked how a party was doing at the time, but it was badly calibrated across parties and gave little or no advance warning of changes in support.
How did British parties use targeted Facebook ads at the 2019 general election?
Mostly by repeating a small number of messages many times. The Conservatives started 9,137 ads using only 452 distinct texts; one text accounted for 2,479 ads and five texts for 63% of all their ads. Labour spent the most on Facebook and Instagram.
Did Leave win the EU referendum on Facebook by being more negative?
Leave did win the engagement battle, but the evidence does not support the claim that it did so by being more negative. Pages aligned with Leave produced 65% of the engagement from 23% of the posts, yet among campaigns, leaders and parties, Remain posts were, if anything, slightly more often negative.
Does Facebook reward the political right?
Not simply. In matched 2020 US Senate races, Republican posts drew more engagement each, but Democrats posted about twice as often, so totals did not clearly differ. In Europe the biggest Facebook premium went to populists, and the very largest to the populist radical left.
What is Janus-faced campaigning?
Janus-faced campaigning is a term from my PhD: a party using different pages with different approaches to reach different audiences, so presenting different faces of the same party to the public. In Britain the two main parties ran a traditional Facebook campaign through their official pages alongside a subsidiary 'new methods' campaign through satellite pages such as Momentum.
Does posting more on Facebook get parties more engagement?
In total, yes, and almost in proportion. In 856,699 posts from 112 party pages and 74 leaders' pages in 20 European countries, a month with twice as many posts brought roughly 1.9 to 2 times the interactions.
Did the pivot to video pay off for political parties on Facebook?
Only for a while. Video and live video drew extra engagement in 2016, but the premium had faded by 2019 and 2020, even though parties kept posting video.
When do political parties post on Facebook, and when do their posts do best?
Parties posted mostly in working hours, but posts made in the evening and on Sundays drew more engagement. The differences are modest.
Does a new party leader bring a new audience on Facebook?
Only briefly. A change of leader brought a moment of attention and a small rise in what each post received, but on average no lasting new audience for the party's page.
What happens to parties' Facebook audiences after an election?
They fall back. Engagement rises steeply through a campaign and drops sharply once the votes are counted, and the extra attention for winners does not last.
Do women who lead parties get angrier reactions on Facebook than men?
No detectable difference once party and position are taken into account. Pooled, women's pages drew about half the share of angry reactions that men's did, but that reflects which parties they lead.
Does Facebook level the field between large and small parties?
Not exactly. Engagement followed votes, but less than proportionally and on different parties: the largest party by votes received the most engagement in only about a quarter of country-years.
Are new parties better at Facebook than established ones?
Not reliably. New parties' posts drew about 32% more interactions, but the estimate is imprecise and its confidence interval includes no difference.
Did Facebook's 2018 News Feed change hurt political parties?
Not on the numbers. The change did not reduce the engagement parties received, but for about a year their audiences shared their posts more.
Are European Parliament election campaigns really second-order on Facebook?
Yes. European Parliament campaigns on Facebook were real but second-order, for parties and even more for their audiences.
Is Wikipedia a better guide to party support than Facebook?
Somewhat. Parties' shares of Wikipedia views tracked their vote shares more closely than their shares of Facebook engagement did, but neither added much to knowing how they had done last time.
Is party engagement on Facebook driven by a few viral posts?
Not mainly. Engagement was concentrated, but not extremely: it is better described as a broad base with a moderate head than as a market of hits.
How do parties' Facebook audiences grow?
Slowly, except around elections. The typical page grew by about half a per cent a month, and growth was several times faster in the months around national elections.
Does being in government cost a party attention on Facebook?
A little. While in government, a party's posts drew about 18% fewer interactions than the same party's posts in opposition.
Who pays for British party advertising on Facebook and Instagram?
Mostly not the parties' own pages. Party pages account for only 8.3% of political and issue ad spending on Meta in Britain, though 19% of the ads.
Do British parties pay for the Facebook pages that people already engage with?
For their own party pages, largely yes. For leaders' pages, no: they earn most of the engagement but get little of the money.
Did people rally round governments on Facebook in the first Covid-19 wave?
A little, and briefly. In Britain government pages' share of attention jumped from 5% to 29% in the first wave, and across Europe governing pages gained on the opposition, but the gain had gone by the summer.
Did Facebook reactions to European parties get angrier?
Angry reactions rose, but so did all emoji reactions. Anger depended more on which party than on when.
What kind of campaign post gets the most engagement on Facebook?
Negative ones. In the month before the 2015 and 2017 UK general elections, posts that criticised or attacked drew about 20% more interactions than other posts on the same page.
Did Facebook cut the reach of political parties' pages?
Not in a steady slide. Engagement per follower, the closest public signal of reach, fell by about 25 to 35% from 2016 to 2018, then recovered to roughly its 2016 level by 2020.
Where do political parties send people when they post links on Facebook?
Increasingly to the news. Own sites took 58% of parties' link posts in 2010 and 35% to 39% from 2016, while news media rose from 17% to between 36% and 43% a year from 2017.
Do parties' Facebook audiences rise and fall together across Europe?
Mostly nationally, not Europe-wide. About 26% of month-to-month swings in a page's engagement were shared with its own country, against about 11% for Europe as a whole, and party families did not move together across borders.
Did Brexit boost Eurosceptic parties on Facebook across Europe?
No sign of it. After the 2016 referendum, posts mentioning Brexit or the UK rose to about 9% of posts on party and leader pages in 19 other European countries, but equally for Eurosceptic and other pages, and Eurosceptic pages drew no extra engagement relative to their rivals.
Should researchers use CrowdTangle's Overperforming Score?
Not in archived exports. There the score is best read as raw interactions rescaled by a page and post type constant set around the time of export, so researchers should work with raw interaction counts, compared within page and period, or with baselines they build and report themselves.
When a party splits, does its Facebook audience follow the breakaway?
Mostly not. In ten European splits the breakaway's share of engagement rose in nine, but the typical breakaway held only about 5% of national interactions afterwards. The only large breakaway audiences, around Farage and Gyurcsány, had already been built on their personal pages before the split.
Do shorter Facebook posts get more engagement?
Not really. What mattered most was whether a post had any text: posts with no text drew about 42% fewer interactions than posts of 101 to 200 characters. Among posts with text, engagement was U-shaped but mostly flat.
Did Romania's biggest party win on Facebook?
No. In the 30 days before the 2016 parliamentary election, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) page drew 7% of the interactions on the three main party pages, against 61% of the three parties' vote. The gap narrowed by 2020 but did not close.
Did Facebook engagement show which Finnish parties would gain votes?
No. Small parties looked larger on Facebook than at the ballot box, but engagement shares did not anticipate who would gain votes: the Greens' share of interactions fell just as their vote rose.
Did Portugal's main parties dominate Facebook?
No. In the month before the 2019 election the Socialists (PS) and the Social Democrats (PSD) drew 43% of the interactions with the Portuguese party and politician pages studied, against 70% of the vote among the parties studied, while small parties drew between 2.5 and 10 times their vote share.
Did Switzerland's health minister outdraw the parties on Facebook during Covid-19?
Yes, for three months. In March to May 2020, the page of Alain Berset, the federal councillor responsible for public health, drew 50% of all interactions on eleven Swiss party and politician pages, up from 13% in the previous twelve months and more than the three party pages combined.
Did the 2015 refugee crisis lift radical right parties on Facebook before the polls?
It lifted them, but not ahead of the polls. Radical right pages drew about 47% more interactions per post than other pages in the same country and month in September and October 2015, but Facebook did not clearly move before the polls did.
Did Viktor Orbán's Facebook page carry the Fidesz migration campaign?
Not in writing. From 2015 to 2019, between 31% and 41% of posts on the Fidesz party page mentioned migration each year, against under 4% on Viktor Orbán's page, which drew 41% to 56% of the two Fidesz pages' engagement each year from 2015, mostly with photos and videos with short captions.