Abstract
In the mid-2010s Facebook promoted native and live video, and news organisations famously "pivoted to video". Did political parties follow, and did it pay? Using 856,220 posts by 112 party pages and 74 party leaders' pages in 20 European countries from January 2010 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle, I trace the formats parties used and the engagement each drew. Parties moved away from links: links fell from about two thirds of posts in 2010 to 2014 to a quarter in 2020, while video uploaded to Facebook rose from 4% of posts in 2014 to 29% in 2019, and live video to about 5%. YouTube links all but disappeared. Part of the shift from links to photos in 2015 coincides with an abrupt change in how posts were classified in May 2015, which I document. Comparing posts by the same page, and with other posts in the same country and month, video drew about 47% more interactions than photos in 2016 and live video about 94% more, but these premiums faded: in 2019 and 2020 video drew about 19% and 13% fewer interactions than photos, and live video no more. Links drew fewer interactions than photos from 2018. Within pages, years with a larger share of video went with more engagement per post. But pages that posted more video in 2016 did not see larger gains in engagement from 2015 to 2019. Parties took up video while it drew extra engagement, and kept posting it after the premium had gone.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). The Pivot to Video: How European Parties and Leaders Changed What They Posted on Facebook, and What It Got Them, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23414628