Go viral on the Facebook! Interactions between candidates and followers on Facebook during the Hungarian general election campaign of 2014

ABSTRACT

The study addresses the question of what type of political content can trigger reactions from electoral candidates’ followers on Facebook. Citizens’ reactivity is increasingly important in contemporary political communication. The politicians’ posts can reach the wider public through the citizens’ public reactions. While we have extended knowledge about mass media reactivity, citizens’ political reactivity on social media is highly underexplored. This study is intended to fill this gap by examining what type of political content can trigger reaction from followers on politicians’ Facebook pages. The data contain 7048 Facebook posts by 183 single-member district candidates posted during the Hungarian general election campaign in 2014. The unit of analysis is the individual Facebook post, and the dependent variables are the numbers of likes, comments, and shares. The independent variables are the structural (text, picture, video, etc.) and substantial (content, emotional tone, etc.) characteristics of each post, after controlling for, inter alia, a general follower-activity score on politicians’ Facebook pages. Results showed that citizens are highly reactive to negative emotion-filled, text-using, personal, and activity-demanding posts. Virality is especially facilitated by memes, videos, negative contents and mobilizing posts, and posts containing a call for sharing.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• virality
• citizens’ reactivity
• political communication
• election campaign
• two-step flow

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Balazs Kiss and Zsofia Papp for their helpful comments and support in different phases of the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Marton Bene is a junior research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Science, Corvinus University of Budapest. His research focuses on political communication, social media, and network analysis. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. Forty-eight per cent of web users in the U.S., see Pew Research Center, October 2014. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are no similar data from Hungary.

2. The News Feed is the constantly updating list of stories in the middle of user's home page. The News Feed includes status updates, photos, videos, links, app activity, and likes from people, and Pages and groups that you follow on Facebook (see https://www.facebook.com/help/327131014036297/). The selection of content appearing in the News Feed is based on a complicated algorithm that personalizes the content based on the user's prior activity (see https://www.facebook.com/business/news/News-Feed-FYI-A-Window-Into-News-Feed).

3. The data were collected between 2015 January and 2015 July.

4. One hundred and sixteen candidates did not have a Facebook page out of 318 candidates.

5. The candidate with the highest follower-activity score (see later) was removed because his score was more than 60% higher than the politician with the second highest score (97 cases). The post of a candidate from the day that has the highest ‘number of posts in the day’ (119 posts during that day) was also removed because it was more than 250% higher than the second highest score. These cases make the algorithm impossible to run. Beyond these cases, all cases were removed that had outlier values on any of the dependent variables (30 cases; outliers defined on candidate's level).

6. Krippendorf's alpha intracoder reliability was measured in 109 posts. Alpha value of structural features = .95; of emotional tone = .87; of character variables = .91; of orientation variables = .82. These values are considered to be high (Hayes & Krippendorff, 2007).

7. Ticker is a tool on Facebook that shows a user's friends’ activity in real time.

8. A meme was defined as picture with text on it, excluding official campaign materials (where the party or candidate's name appears on it).

9. It occurred only in three posts; therefore, this variable was not involved in the models.

10. The formula of weighted average popularity is , where is average likes, is average comments, and is average shares, and , , and measure the respective weights.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (legal successor of: National Research, Development and Innovation Office [NKFI]) [grant agreement number 112323].