Structured Abstract: Political Campaigning on Twitter—The Use of Language, Message Tone, and Implications for Political Marketing Communication from the UK General Election 2015

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet has played a significant role in the success of election campaigns and influencing voters (Baines 2011). The use of social media in political marketing can facilitate bidirectional engagement between political parties and their audiences, although actual social media adoption by political parties is akin to prior, dissemination platforms (Larsson and Moe 2011). In the UK, the 2015 General Election became known as the ‘Selfie Election’, with party leaders engaging with the electorate through photographs shared across different social media platforms, especially Twitter (The Telegraph 2015). As parties further utilize social media for engagement with the electorate, and traditional media channels report social media posts as news, it becomes increasingly pertinent to understand the communication between political parties and the public in order to optimize our understanding of successful communication. For political parties this means the potential to address their message for effectiveness, for the public it means the ability to interpret opinion polls more fully alongside conversations that are occurring online in real time, and for wider knowledge this identifies the potential of Twitter posts for use as predictors to general election success.