There is no shred of doubt that Labour ran the best social media campaign, everything they did was completely on point in order to target demographic of people in which they intended. However, although on social media they did everything correct, they still did not manage to obtain the majority voters, so this raises the question what did they do wrong? And what did conservative do right?

As I mentioned before in my previous post, social media has really aided the parties in pumping out large amounts of information fast in order to target the right people. All political parties took advantage of the fact that on twitter you can only post in 140 characters at a time. This means that what you say has got to be short, sweet and snappy in order to grab the attention of the masses! Although all the political parties did this, labours methods were just much more effective. Labour knew their target demographic and used social media to their completely advantage in order to post just enough to grab young peoples attention to secure a vote, but not enough to give them the bigger picture, meaning that the recipicants only see what the party wanted them to see and because, relying on the fact that people are lazy, they accept what they are told rather than taking the time to look deeper into what is being said and promised and the repercussions.

An example of a typical tweet by labour is this:

“@jeremycorbyn I’m in Milton Keynes where house prices have gone up 50% in 5 years. We’ll end housing crisis here & across Britain.”

This was tweeted today, Monday 14^th August 2017 and it is a prime example of how Labour used twitter to its extreme advantage during the election. Lets pick it apart, it picks out a problem, in this case housing, and says he’s going to fix it and then sends this out to 1.4 million people. This all looks very fair and well and when you read it you feel positive and accept that because Jeremy Corbyn has tweeted it its true, accurate, and positive. However what he doesn’t specify is how or when this is going to happen, or even who is going to pay for it. He doesn’t have to explain anything, especially not in 140 characters because people are happier hearing the message and accepting it rather than questioning how its going to happen.

Although this isn’t the best and accurate method in terms of understating politics, it certainly meant that Labour ran the better social media campaign, and although all the parities did it, Labour just excelled at it. Over 40% of the tweets relating to the election were about Labour, with only 26% of Labour, SNP, UKIP and Liberal Democrats with just 19%, 9.5% and 5.7%. This such high percentage cant just be due to clever worded tweets however, when looking further into Labours social media methods you can see that Bots accounted for around 12% of the tweets about the election but despite this Labour still has the highest frequency of tweets about them. So why didn’t they win? In my opinion this was down to the fact that, as I’ve mentioned before, their target demographic was young people who are certainly the most active group of people on social media, they as a whole are the most passionate, shout the loudest and have the most followers, they control the trends and also as well as this like to fit in with their peers. However, they don’t actually make up the majority of the British population, and despite 80% of all young people voting in this years general election, a higher number than ever before, they are still not the biggest age group in numbers.

In my personal opinion although Labour did amazingly in their social media take over, I think they were lacking in other places in which the other parties excelled, they put such a heavy focus on securing the votes of the young people and that of the working class, however they neglected in persuading the rest of the people to vote for them and securing the slightly more difficult votes to acquire.

With social media you can adjust your timeline to mean you can literally just see the information you want to, whether this is information about your favorite political party, make up tutorials, information about your favorite pop star, or literally just 101 funny videos of cats. What you see is completely up to you and customized by you. Although this is a great function for personal use when it comes to politics and getting the ‘bigger picture’ it certainly has its quality downfalls.

In my opinion its so difficult to tell if the high use of social media improved the quality of the debate. Personally I don’t think it did, if anything it decreased the quality of the debate because of the immaturity of some of the social media interactions it actually detracted away from the seriousness of it. I found myself questioning a lot if most of the people who were tweeting #VoteLabour, actually even knew what labours policies were, or if they were just tweeting that because they felt pressured to incase they got ridiculed for wanting to vote for another party. In my opinion I don’t feel like the majority of the young people who were on social media telling people to vote labour knew exactly what the correct labour policies were or quite the extent of them and the repercussions on the country as a whole, but rather they were just following what they have understood of the policies from social media. For example the main thing that was plastered all over social media was that labour were planning on abolishing tuition fees and reintroducing maintenance grants for university students and although that sounds all fair and good on the surface, you cant see the bigger picture through the 140 characters that make up a tweet. This follows the idea that you shouldn’t believe everything that you see online, just because its on social media doesn’t mean its true….or the right thing for the good of the country. What labour supporters failed to tweet about was where was this money going to come from? It would result in higher tax on other fields to cover the costs of the tuition fees in order to keep the universities up and running and pay the staff.

These factors in my opinion meant that there may have been a slighter lower of quality of debate since the introduction of politics into social media as a new medium. People aren’t properly researching everything as they feel they have gained enough knowledge via their various feeds on their iphones and are voting purely based on this information fed to them. Another aspect that has resulted in a lower quality of debate is the amount of fake news there is that circulates the internet, I could tweet some completely fake information and if it gets 10K retweets or reposts people will believe its true, because of course, because its got so many shares it must be true! As I mentioned before social media has made people lazy which results in the lower quality of the debate because a lot of people will be voting on completely false information. How can you tell the real news from the fake news? This also raises the question of, do people only want to hear what they want to hear? Not what they need to hear?

Another point that I want to draw upon is that social media is such an inaccurate reflection on how the debate will go. If I were to place bets on the outcome of the 2017 debate I would have put a lot of money on Labour winning, I would also have put money that Hillary Clinton would have won due to the sheer volume of anti trump posts. To me this demonstrates that just because something is posted about a lot doesn’t mean it’s a confirmed outcome. It isn’t fashionable or accepted to agree with Donald Trumps policies or to agree with conservative’s policies, however they both still managed to win their campaigns. Does this mean that on social media we are being fed the correct information to result in a fair debate? Or are we just listening to the parties who can shout the loudest? People still need to read news papers, watch TV debates and listen to the news. Social media is powerful in order to be able to get a message out quickly however I worry that people are becoming lazy. If they only follow people, including celebrities, who share their views as such without other sources of information they will get a very biased, one sided view. An effective debate requires listening to people who you may not originally agree with, listening to their side so you have the whole story and the bigger picture, not just following the crowds on twitter.

For further reading read here: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/31/labour-dominating-election-conversation-on-twitter-study-finds

As we know its all fair and well using social media to reach out to our small group of close friends and family, but the real question is, how can it be used to reach the masses and the right people you’re trying to target?  To get the most effective use out of social media in order to aid in helping and promoting their campaign in the most efficient way possible it is necessary to target the correct groups of people. In the 2017 election Labour really used the social media software as a way to target young people and reach out to them in a manor in which they can see and relate to. This is done using bots, originally used for advertising bots are a way to target a particular group of people. These can be people in the same age group, the same class or the same interests meaning that these groups of people were flooded with information of what the Labour party wanted them to see in order to secure the votes of the people. The fact that there was such a high flooding of information meant that people didn’t feel the need to look else where in order to gain information about what the different parties were promising to do if and when they got elected. Without the impact of Labour using social media to target young people specifically in the 2017 General Election the lead up to the election may have been completely different with, just like previous years, a lot lower interest shown from the young people in the age bracket of 18-30 years old.

Thankfully this wasn’t the case with an astonishing number of young people in the age bracket of 18-30 years old showing a great deal of interest and passion towards the 2017 election.  This could be down to a raise in maturity in these ages however it is more likely, in my opinion, to be down to very clever targeting of marginal voters. By using social media handles to reach people it has immediately made the politicians more accessible and relatable. As well as being a much cheaper and faster method of reaching people, it also humanises the candidates and puts them on the same level as the voters meaning there is a stronger connection.  Why I found most interesting about the different uses of social media in the run up to election was the way the public warmed to each candidate via social media, Corbyn begain to be seen as some what of a martyr to the young Labour voters. However although they were pro Corbyn they were all the while relishing in posting and retweeting countless Theresa May ‘trolls’ and ‘memes’ making fun of her and mainly related to an interview where she admits that the naughtiest thing that she has ever done was run through a wheat field.  The trolls included some celebrities and other politicians. To me, this shows that by a lack of presence on social media it creates a divide between the politicians and the voters, making them less relatable and on two completely different levels.

This kind of movement and joining together of young people from all different backgrounds simply would not have happened anywhere near to this kind of magnitude if social media did not exist. Speeches and print announcements just don’t have the same kind of a fast impact on a large group of people that can be achieved from social media.

Even if you aren’t interested in politics in the slightest, it is undoubtable that 2017 was the year that you found yourself entering into many educated or, more likely, uneducated heated discussions with friends, family and strangers online regarding whether you should or shouldn’t actually #VoteLabour. The way that people interact with the outside world is changing, since having everything accessible to us at a touch of a finger people, especially young people, don’t bother with buying print news papers or watching traditional news programs such as BBC news on the TV. Instead social media is our number once source of political information meaning that political parties are having to change the way in which they interact with electorate. In the past it would have been through various methods such as television and newspapers, canvassing and leaflet drops as well as public speaking. Although these methods still exist they are not effective ways of grabbing the correct and broader attention of the masses. These can also add up to be very expensive methods and are increasingly becoming less important outreach methods and although they are still used, platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are taking over. The most important aspect of social media websites such as Twitter, Youtube and Facebook in terms of the 2017 election was that it meant regular people had a platform to talk and discuss their own political views and standpoints as well as feeling a deeper personal connection to the politicians running in the election humanizing them on a more relatable level.

Campaigns run on social media are enhanced in their effectiveness by not only the fact that more people, especially younger people can be reached and targeted but also by the fact that we can see other people commenting on the campaign and sharing their own views, this then causing a greater engagement. The higher the engagement the, greater interaction and the more people reached. There have been some major political shifts occurring because of effective social media campaigns even as simple as slogans. Two key examples of this were Obama and especially and most recently with Trump with his slogan ‘Make American Great Again’. Although most of the wider world population didn’t agree with Trumps ideas, the slogan ‘Make American Great Again’ was plastered all over all of our social media feeds whether it was promoting his cause or trolling it. This follows the idea that no press is bad press and in Trumps case all the bad and negative press really worked in his favour as it got the world talking.