General Election or Social Media Election?

The Result

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TORY’S RULE ON…

Theresa May’s gamble failed. They lost their parliamentary majority and turned to DUP to support them in forming a new government.

This year’s general election saw the Conservatives win 42.4% of this year vote, despite beating the opposing parties, they still failed to maintain an overall majority. Labour gained 21 seats, this included seats from the Conservatives and the Sheffield Hallam vote from Liberal Democrat’s Nick Clegg.  Labour may have not won the overall majority either, but the social media election clearly made some impact as Labour gained seats and Theresa May lost them. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party increased its tally by 31 seats.

 

Conservatives Crumble

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Crumble? But they won I hear you argue, yes evidently Theresa May is still our prime minster. But! in terms of the social media election, Conservatives ran an ineffective and unsuccessful digital campaign. Arguably this is why Theresa May failed to attract new voters, or even keep the ones she already had, with her social media strategy being said to have played a factor in May’s failure to win the overall majority. No political party won the majority in parliament this year, Theresa May’s conservative lost seats in England and Wales to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. It was clear that the 1 Million Theresa May’s spent on her negative Facebook adverts didn’t pay off as Labour gained seats.

Labour were able to appeal to their audience whereas the Conservatives failed to understand the basics of Facebook advertising. The results have left the conservatives no choice to rethink and rebuild their digital strategy, even the party candidate themselves described their social media campaign as ‘disastrous’. They were ridiculed for the generic party slogan ‘strong and stable’ that was plastered all over Facebook. If the conservatives spent £1m on their social media campaign, they clearly knew the importance of it, they just didn’t appreciate how to use it to market their campaign.

‘We are social’ showed that Labour saw a 61% increase in followers on social media during the six weeks of election campaign, compared to a small 6% rise for the conservatives. They missed the opportunity to target young people through the use of social media, they missed power of this digital age! They were fighting an opposition party with over 500,000 members, social media was more important than ever.

The power of social media, means you can target any one at any age, in any location and with any interest and speak directly to them. Thousands of business’ would envy the power and money political parties have to be able market their campaign via social media, it’s just a shame the Tories failed to make the most this opportunity. Before the influence of social media the political campaigns were mostly through word of mouth and face to face campaigns, this was limiting as its geographically impossible to engage with everyone. Facebook, Twitter and even Snapchat allows a single person to engage with hundreds of thousands of people per day, what a brilliant way to get your message across!

That being said, you’re message counts, just like first impressions. If the conservatives are sending out irrelevant messages to their digital audience, it immediately puts them at risk at avoiding a key young audience. I mean what young teenage cares about whether or not a party is Strong and Stable? Anyone can say they’re ‘strong and stable’, conservatives needed to talk and target topics that appeal to a minority audience. They way Labour did with University tuition fees. Relevance is such be a key aspect into any marketing campaign and with all the money the Conservative party spent on their digital strategy, it should have been more efficient, maybe then they would have won the majority Theresa May hoped for.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Twitter Takeover

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Top 10 Tweets from 2017 General Election 

Why not highlight what huge part Twitter played in this years debates then to share some of the best things to come from this years election.

1.

With this years election only a year after the EU referendum and 3 years ahead of schedule, Richard Osman cheered his way in to first place.

2.

Now this Scobby Doo reference couldn’t be more fitting to the situation…

3. Again highlighting how Britain never fail to find comedy even in the most serious of moments.

4.

5.

This one had to make the top 5.

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8. Oh the power of Wikipedia …

9.

 

The Tories really did lack social media support didn’t they.

10.

Oh Jeremy …

#Grime4Corbyn

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Corbyn’s successful digital campaign led to hundreds of grime artists showing their support for the Labour leader with the lights of MOBO award winning Stormzy, who has over 890,000 followers on twitter ‘Digging what Jeremy Corbyn says’. Grime is a genre of music that emerged in London in the early 2000s. It initially spread among private radio stations that had a small following before recently achieving a much mainstream recognition in the UK. Grime is recognized as a creative and innovative musical style but respectively, the idea that the music is the package of “youth making music for youth” is seen as the crucial factor for grime’s success. With that as a key message and Labour’s key aim to support the younger generation it was no doubt that the internet would bring together such an unlikely pair through their common ground.

 

The aspiring key objective that both Grime artists and Corbyn adopted was not to pressure young people with who they should vote for but to simply just vote! This year’s general election proved that you’re vote really can make a difference with results showing that a record breaking 72% of young people turned out to vote in this year’s general election. I mean, the election might not have given Corbyn the overall result he wanted but he should certainly be proud of that! In my eyes young people are the most important people when it comes to a general election as its their future Brits are voting for. So hats off to Corbyn to targeting the young audience, he even kept ‘down with the kids’ by regularly adding videos to the social phenomenon that is snap chat.

https://twitter.com/UKLabour/status/869220809822187520/video/1

As part as their digital campaign Labour published videos with popular Grime artists who highlighted some of the key messages from the Labour party manifesto. Above AJ Tracey speaks out about the Labour party and how they’re going to tackle the housing crisis, highlighting Labour’s aim to give young people a positive future. We all know celebrity endorsement sells and with AJ Tracey touching on such personal topics, young people (seemingly grime fans) feel connected to him on a personal level which instantly gains supporters. According to an analysis by Buzzfeed News, Labours celebrity endorsements were the most shared election-related articles on Facebook. In total, his celebrity related articles were shared around 971,700 times, significantly more than the posts relating to Labour’s rise in the opinion polls, which received around 557,600 shares.

 

Social Media Election

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 “Labour won the social media election”

Living in this digital age, it would be almost impossible for digital technology not to have an impact and influence on such a historical event like this year’s general election. It was almost impossible to scroll through your twitter news feed without some kind of Tory hating teenage screaming at you to vote labour so he can conveniently go to university without paying a penny for his tuition fee. It was clear to see that the all the opposing parties in this year’s general election saw social media was a crucial part of a successful campaign.

In the recent years in particular, Social media has become a big part of political campaigning, parties have found new ways to reach to potential supporters. The election battle became an online one this year. Many digital strategists say that it was Labour that outdid the conservatives in the battle for voters on social media for the first time in a major election. So much so that it was shocking to see that Labour weren’t able to beat Conservative’s on June the 8th, needless the say, the social media debates obviously made some impact as the conservatives failed to win the majority Theresa May hoped for.

Even former press adviser to conservatives David Cameron, Giles Kennigham, applauded Labour’s “very polished social media presence”, they knew there audience and how to target them.  Conservatives’  on the other hand, digital campaign was described by as ‘unprepared and unresponsive’ (Booth, 2017).

It didn’t go without noticing that the conservative digital strategy heavily focused on attacking the opposing parties to gain seats rather than focusing on defending its own vulnerable seats. It was claimed that the ‘Tories spent more than £1m on negative Facebook adverts attacking Jeremy Corbyn (Kentish, 2017). A series of videos and graphics showing the Labour leader’s past comments on debt, anti-terror laws and the IRA were promoted by the official Tory Facebook and Twitter account.

A leader who supports our armed forces or one who wants to abolish them? The choice is clear: Corbyn and your security is too big a risk.

Posted by Conservatives on Wednesday, 10 May 2017

This video was published on the Conservative’s Facebook and as you can see little effort was put into the video which had 204,000 views. It  starts with May saying the Conservatives are “always committed to a strong national defense and supporting the finest armed forces known to man” against two quite clearly edited and framed clips of Jeremy Corbyn saying “wouldn’t it be wonderful if every politician around what the people of Costa Rica have done and abolished their arm” which clearly doesn’t do Labour any favours.

In high contrast, Labour on the other hand who were praised for their digital strategy during this year’s General Election focused on positive campaigning. Unlike the Conservatives they focused on a uplifting campaign and aimed to rally their own supporters rather than slander the opposing parties. Experts argue this is what helped the party with the shock election results although they still fell short of the conservatives.

Labour began early and invested heavily into social media to encourage voters, in particular young people, to register to vote. This obviously paid off as a record number of 622,00 people joined the electoral system in the final 24hours of the registration period alone. Nevertheless both main parties targeted Facebook adverts at specific constituencies, with the Conservatives reported to have focused their campaigning on gaining seats in the north of England.

Corbyn’s social media strategy was supported by many popular campaigning organisations, for example Momentum, who produced its own video and social media content. Evidently, that led to almost a quarter of all UK Facebook users seeing a Momentum video on their Facebook feed in the last week of the campaign alone. May’s strategy was purely fixated on videos to watch, contrast to the Momentum videos that prioritised content that was likely to be shared between friends which led to a more widespread campaign.

If users were sharing the videos it meant that Momentum could spend less on their online marketing campaign, it was claimed the spent as little as £2,000 advertising it content on Facebook. Whereas the Conservatives spent more than £1m on Facebook posts, which were primarily negative messages attacking Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour party.

 

Labour mindfully ended their campaign with this final video, not the most traditional political format but influential none the less with over 18,202 Re-tweets and 29,458 likes on Twitter.  The video included a series of clips of Jeremy Corbyn with members of the public brilliantly connoting his main message of  his ‘for the many, not the few’ campaign.