Impact of Promotional Activities on Social Networks on Election Results for the Mayor of Zagreb in 2021

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Political communication and political marketing have fully embraced the potentials and powerof digital social networks, such as Facebook. The rise of social networks has revolutionized politicalmarketing, creating new opportunities and challenges for political contestants. Today, itwould be hard to imagine a political campaign without the use of social networks, so it is not surprisingthat human and financial resources dedicated to political promotion on social networksare constantly increasing. The main objective of this paper was to research the impact and relationshipof promotional activities on the Facebook social network on the election results of themayor of Zagreb in the local election of 2021. Obtained results proved the undeniable existenceof a statistically significant, strong positive linear relationship (correlation) between all typesof user reactions on the social network and the number of votes. However, a strong correlationdoes not necessarily mean that one variable directly causes the other. They only indicate thepresence of a relationship between the variables. The practical implication of this research isfound in the possibility of laying the groundwork for a future, more refined and better-testedpredictor model for forecasting voting results solely based on user reactions and engagement onsocial networks, rather than on conventional voter surveys. Such a model would be much morecost and time-efficient compared to the personal surveying methods.