Tag: Online engagement
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The Facebook Decade: why Facebook mattered for politics, 2010 to 2020
For about ten years Facebook was where parties went to reach the whole electorate. Here is why it mattered for politics, what my thesis and papers found, and what it never was: a poll.
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Europe’s parties all talked about Brexit. Eurosceptic pages got no extra lift.
After the 2016 referendum, Brexit posts jumped to about 9% on party pages across 19 countries. But Eurosceptic pages drew no more engagement than their rivals at home.
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CrowdTangle’s Overperforming Score aged badly. Count the interactions instead.
In archived CrowdTangle exports, the Overperforming Score compares every post with its page’s typical post at export time, so old posts look like flops (median score -25 in 2010, -1.1 in 2020) and differences between pages vanish.
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When a party splits, who keeps the Facebook crowd?
In ten European party splits, nine breakaways grew their share of Facebook engagement, but typically only to about 5% of national interactions. The big breakaway audiences came with leaders who already had them.
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On party Facebook pages, posts with no text did worst. Length barely mattered.
Across 856,220 Facebook posts by European parties and leaders, posts with no text drew about 42% fewer interactions. Once a post had text, its length went with only small differences, though the longest posts drew more shares.
