{"id":120,"date":"2017-08-14T22:42:08","date_gmt":"2017-08-14T22:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/?p=120"},"modified":"2017-08-16T11:00:45","modified_gmt":"2017-08-16T11:00:45","slug":"120","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/2017\/08\/14\/120\/","title":{"rendered":"Who ran a better social media campaign and why? What do the losing party need to learn?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

An example of a typical tweet by labour is this:<\/p>\n

“@jeremycorbyn<\/b><\/span><\/a> I’m in Milton Keynes where house prices have gone up 50% in 5 years. We’ll end housing crisis here & across Britain.”<\/span><\/p>\n

This was tweeted today, Monday 14th<\/sup> 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\u2019s 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\u2019t specify is how or when this is going to happen, or even who is going to pay for it. He doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Although this isn\u2019t 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\u2019t they win? In my opinion this was down to the fact that, as I\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions\/139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.buprojects.uk\/2016-2017\/natashadowns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}