In the mid-2010s Facebook promoted video and live video, and news organisations famously “pivoted to video”. Did political parties follow, and did it pay?

The paper
The Pivot to Video: How European Parties and Leaders Changed What They Posted on Facebook, and What It Got Them, 2010 to 2020
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

I used 856,220 posts by 112 party pages and 74 party leaders’ pages in 20 European countries from January 2010 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle, Meta’s former tool for tracking public Facebook pages. I traced the formats parties used and the engagement each drew.

What I found

Parties moved away from links. Links fell from about two thirds of posts in 2010 to 2014 to a quarter in 2020. Video uploaded to Facebook rose from 4% of posts in 2014 to 29% in 2019, and live video reached about 5%. YouTube links all but disappeared. Part of the shift from links to photos in 2015 coincides with an abrupt change in how posts were classified in May 2015, which I document in the paper.

Comparing posts by the same page, and with other posts in the same country and month, video drew about 47% more interactions than photos in 2016, and live video about 94% more. But these premiums faded. In 2019 and 2020 video drew about 19% and 13% fewer interactions than photos, and live video drew no more. Links drew fewer interactions than photos from 2018. Pages that posted more video in 2016 did not see larger gains in engagement from 2015 to 2019.

Parties took up video while it drew extra engagement, and kept posting it after the premium had gone.

Caveats

These are party and leader pages in 20 countries, with data exported in 2020. Engagement is not the same as reach or persuasion, and the paper is a preprint that has not been peer reviewed.

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