Online attention is often described as a world of hits: a few things go viral and take most of the attention. I wanted to know whether that is true of political parties on Facebook. Does a party’s engagement come from a handful of viral posts, or from the many posts it makes day to day?

The paper
Hits or the Long Tail? How Concentrated Is the Facebook Engagement of European Parties and Leaders, 2010 to 2020
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

I used 846,289 posts from 185 party and leader pages in 20 European countries between 2010 and 2020, collected through CrowdTangle, Meta’s former tool for tracking public Facebook pages. For each page and each year, I measured how its engagement (reactions, comments and shares) was spread across its posts.

What I found

Engagement was concentrated, but not extremely. In the median page-year the top 1% of posts drew 8% of the interactions, the top 10% drew 36%, and the bottom half of posts drew 18%. The single most engaging post of the year drew 2.8% of a page’s interactions in the median page-year, and more than 10% in only 5% of page-years.

The pattern was similar for parties and leaders, for populist and other parties, and for parties in and out of government. It was somewhat less concentrated on pages that got more engagement per post. Within pages, the share going to the top tenth of posts rose by about 0.7 points a year until 2018, then fell.

Whether good years were driven by hits is less clear. The evidence is mixed: depending on how extreme year-to-year swings are handled, the top tenth of posts accounted for between 39% and 50% of the variance in changes, against a 38% share. The most engaging posts were more often videos and photos and less often links, and were more likely to fall in the 30 days before a national election.

The engagement parties get on Facebook is better described as a broad base with a moderate head than as a market of hits.

Caveats

This is Facebook engagement on parties’ own pages, from data I exported in 2020. It describes attention, not support, and says nothing about who saw what, or about paid promotion. The paper is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.

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