Posting or Advertising? How Political Parties Adapt Their Messaging Strategies to Facebook’s Organic and Paid Media Affordances

Abstract

Facebook plays a key role in election campaigns because it provides strategic marketing affordances for political parties’ electoral goals. Organic media allow to engage regularly with broader audiences through publicly visible Facebook posts. Paid media advertisements draw on personal data to target tailored messages only at selected users. Thus, political parties can misuse them to highlight contradictory issues or drive negative narratives to susceptible voters. However, studies are lacking about how and to what extent parties adapt the use and content of their messaging strategies to Facebook’s organic and paid media affordances. To provide answers to these questions, this study draws on data from a manual content analysis to compare the timing and content strategies of all posts, sponsored post, and ads which were distributed by six parties in a four-week time span before the 2018 German state election in Hesse. Our results add to the political marketing literature by showing that parties use organic and paid media as independent messaging strategies. Both are published at rather different times in the campaign and with different campaign functions, issues, and degrees of negativity. Further, we show that parties’ organic and paid messaging strategies are dependent on party characteristics and electoral competition.

Keywords:

• Campaign strategy
• content analysis
• political campaigns
• political advertising
• political marketing microtargeting

Notes

1 Ad delivery refers to the process by which Facebook shows paid content to users based on so-called ‘ad auctions’. They determine which paid content will be shown in which order for a specific search, user timeline or feed from among all of the created paid content that includes the respective user in the target audience (Facebook 2020a).

2 During the time of data collection, Facebook’s Ad Library and its respective API wasn’t introduced in Europe (Leerssen et al. 2019). Therefore, all sponsored posts and ads were published on seperate Facebook ad pages for each Facebook page. However, ads’ metadata, such as impressions or spending, wasn´t published and thus couldn’t be accessed.

Additional information

Funding

Jörg Haßler contributed to the publication as Head of the Junior Research Group “DigiDeMo” which is funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and coordinated by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt).