The Hadoq digital marketing agency has presented a report on the effectiveness of the political parties on social media, six days before the General Election.
For several years now, the electoral campaigns have also played out on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In this arena, traditional parties have very different strategies from newer arrivals.
PSOE, PP and Ciudadanos rely more on their Twitter presence. These are the political organisations which use this social network the most, with more than 1,000 messages published by each group in the two months studied (August 24th to October 24th). Over this same period, Unidas Podemos posted 887 tweets, while Vox tweeted around 547 times.
Vox has a much more active Instagram presence, with 88 posts published on that platform, in line with the data gathered by Hadoq using the social media analysis tool Welovroi.
Meanwhile, Pablo Iglesias’ party prefers Facebook to reach their users. It is by far the group which uses this platform the most, with more than 500 messages published in these two months. This is practically double its political rivals. To this end, it is worth nothing that Unidas Podemos are the group who invest the most in advertising to boost their messages on Facebook. They spent nearly 800,000 euros on this type of advertising in the last seven months, a figure which is much higher than the other parties.
Nonetheless, Santiago Abascal’s party obtained the highest rates of interaction, double the rate of its competitors for this indicator. It particularly stood out on Instagram -the social network used by millennials- where VOX had 3 million interactions in just two months. The party which came closest to them is the PP, with just 219,000.
In fact, VOX generated more than 8 million interactions across its three profiles on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The party ranked second by this metric was Unidas Podemos, which generated no more than 4 million. The rest of the national parties lag far behind, with their interactions taking place primarily on Twitter.
According to a Hadoq study, Vox has a much higher rate of engagement compared to the competing parties.
Although Vox has a similar number of followers on social media when compared to the PP, PSOE and Ciudadanos (around 1 million, while Podemos has 2.8 million), their rate of engagement is much higher. This metric measures the percentage of users who interact with their posts and their reach. It definitively determines the party’s effectiveness on this type of platform.
In this area, VOX has an engagement rate which is eight times more than that of Ciudadanos, seven times more than Unidas Podemos, six times more than the PP and four times more than the PP.
It should be noted that a large number of the interactions registered during this period by Hadoq were related to the violent incidents in Catalonia, in which Vox was very involved.
The differences are even greater if we measure the engagement rate of the candidates in the running to lead the Spanish Government. Here, Santiago Abascal has a rate of 16 points, 10 times higher than Pablo Iglesias. It is worth keeping in mind that the leader of Unidas Podemos has more followers (3.3 million across his Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts), while Santiago Abascal has less than a million (the lowest of the five faces on the list).
