Definition of Political Campaign

Political campaign is an organized effort which try to impress

and affect the decision making of an a specific group.

FOREIGN LITERARTURE

Social media have become the common communication channels of

candidates during election campaigns. Facebook and Twitter is one

of the medium they are using to directly reach out to voters,

mobilize supporters, and to impress public. These forming or

relating changes in political communication that present election

candidates can widened their range of strategic choices.

Understanding the ways in which politicians adapt the contents of

their messages to the unusual different platforms to produce deeper

insights. Candidates might change their communication to the

sociotechnical environments of platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

Political parties all over the globe noticed that along with

advertising on traditional mediums such as newspapers, television,

and radio they must invest in digital marketing if they want to

compete with their rivals. Over the past few years, UK and US are

using social media campaigns to defeat their opponents. From late

2016, Demos research found that 23% of UK adult social media users

believe social media platforms help them understand to understand

the parties policies positions prior to an election, and 26% said

social media made them more likely to vote. In US, the great
example of political marketing in their recent history is Donald

Trump’s digital campaign. Though it was very controversial, the

now U.S President’s campaign was extremely effective. Trump using

social media might be the biggest reason why he won the election.

Brad Parscale, is one of those few people who can use and tweet

using the account of Trump. Trump’s campaign largest source of

funding was digital operations. In Ireland, Leo Varadkar was

elected as Ireland’s Taoiseach, Minister for Defence and leader of

Fine Gael in June 2017. Varadkar believes that social media will

play a “key part of the modernization of Government

communications,”.

Norris stated that on Twitter, most user accounts are visible in

public and accessible even for those people who does not use

Twitter. Its usage is centered around topics and the retweet

feature facilities the diffusion of political information beyond

the direct follower network via two-step flow processes. In

Facebook, accounts are private and its usage is based on one-way

or reciprocal friendship ties. Information travels less fluidy

through this medium, also due to extensive algorithmic filtering

of contents. Thus, the audience in Facebook posts mostly consists

of people already “liking” a candidate page.

However, Kriss (2016), stated that due to different architectures

of social media platforms, highlighted topics could also differ

officials emphasizing that journalist use Twitter as an “index of

public opinion,” which implies that targeted campaign messages on

Twitter have the potential to create spillover effects to the other

media.

Larsson and Skogerbo (2016) analyze that local Politicians valued

Facebook higher than political communication, whereas politicians

at the national level preferred Twitter. The former medium seems

to be particularly suited for local politics, which election

campaigning is to large extent about, while the latter is being

used to connect to national audiences.

The internet is now a core element of modern political campaigns.

E-mail, websites, and podcasts are communication technologies that

used for various forms for activism enable faster communications

by citizen movements and deliver a message to a large audience.

Foreign Study

In a study of Norwegian election campaigns, politicians reported

they used social media for dialogue with voters. Facebook was the

primary platform for marketing and Twitter was used for more

continuous dialogue.

Druckman and his colleague presented several findings in the study.

The authors of the campaign officials revealed that even though

candidates websites and TV ads, the authors showed that candidates

are equally likely to use both media for negative campaigning,

implying that the medium and different user groups do not matter

much in campaign strategy.

Althaus and Tewksberry(2002) stated that the findings posit that

taken together, citizens who actually use Internet for political

purposes have rather specific political campaigns, politicians

have so far used the Web with a mass audience in their minds. They

observed that the skewed perceptions in the importance of Internet

users should be even more pronounced when using social media, given

he social and algorithmic cues that these platforms provide.

According to Jungherr and his colleagues(2016) showed that during

the German federal election campaign 2013, topic priorities of

Twitter audiences do something different from a survey and mass

media coverage. Election Campaigning on social media has been

studied extensively, researchers examined how election campaigns

unfold, how candidates are embedded in communication networks, and

how they interact among themselves and with the public. Still, in

terms of this research, this study is very limited as mentioned by

Jungherr, first most studies focused on one isolated platform

(Facebook, Twitter, etc,.). Seecond, the amount of this work

concentrated on the actual contents of communication going beyond

studies coded contents of social media posts by U.S. politicians,

these efforts mostly consisted of smaller samples or did not

specifically categorize the topics politicians talk about. Third,

most research is areas to the boundaries of election campaigning

on a given social media platform.

In 2013, German election political audiences on Twitter rarely

talked about the core political issues like the euro crisis or

energy policy, but predominantly addressed NSA surveillance and

campaign-related events like the televised debate between the

leading national candidates. Despite the fact research has

concentrated on online campaigning, it is still unclear how

politicians use different social media platforms in political

communication. Focusing on the German federal election campaign

2013, this investigates whether election candidates address the

topics most important to the mass audience and to which extent

their communication is shaped by the characteristics of Facebook

and Twitter. Based on open-ended responses from a representative

survey conducted during the election campaign, we train a human-

interpretable Bayesian language model to identify political

topics. Applying the model to social media messages of candidates

and their direct audiences, we find that both prioritize different

topics than the mass audience. The analysis also shows that

politicians use Facebook and Twitter for different purposes. We

communication on social media induced by the particular

characteristics of audiences and sociotechnical environments.

Candidates prefer Twitter to discuss policies and unfolding

campaign like TV debates. Also, candidates prefer Facebook for

campaigning and mobilization purposes.