A party’s Facebook audience is the base its reach and engagement rest on, yet we know little about how such audiences grow. I tracked them.

The paper
Building an Audience: What Drove Growth in the Facebook Followings of European Parties and Leaders, 2016 to 2020
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

I tracked the number of page likes of 112 party pages and 74 party leaders’ pages in 20 European countries, month by month from 2016 to 2020, using the counts recorded with each post collected through CrowdTangle, Meta’s former tool for tracking public Facebook pages.

What I found

The typical page grew by about half a per cent a month, and growth slowed from about 1.3% a month in 2016 to about 0.3% from 2018. Growth was concentrated around elections. Compared with the same page in other months, and with other pages in the same calendar month, pages grew by about 3% more in the month before a national election and by about 5% more in the month of the election, several times the median monthly rate, but no faster in the month after. Those two months made up 5% of page-months and 18% of growth. The European Parliament election of May 2019 added about 1.5 points.

A change of party leader did not add followers to the party’s page. Pages gained more followers in months when they received more engagement, holding constant how much they posted, while posting more without more engagement was not associated with extra growth. Leaders’ pages and populist parties’ pages grew faster, and larger pages more slowly.

Followings grew several times faster around elections, though most cumulative growth still accrued, slowly, in ordinary months.

Caveats

Page likes are a rough measure of an audience. They include people who stopped paying attention long ago. The paper is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.

The views in this post and the paper are my own.