In recent years, social networks have become the new voting ground for parties and their leaders. The immediacy and the ability to go viral The two ingredients that these channels offer are two ingredients that have been captivating politicians when it comes to conveying their messages to society. They also know that it is the only vehicle through which they can reach certain groups of the population that are more distant from their natural environments, such as young people.
This is why political parties, especially the newer ones, have put all their focus on digital communication, exploiting to the maximum the potential of these platforms with simple, direct and emotion-based arguments. This is a feature that is becoming increasingly common in the social media strategy of political parties and leaders.
Vox has used simple, emotional and highly visual messaging to captivate Instagram audiences and become a plausible option, according to Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubían expert in political communication. In his opinion, the attack that the outsider party has received from other political formations, as happened to Trump, has served to "place Vox at the centre of all communication".
The Vox's success on Instagram is explained, among other reasons, by the visual content they have been able to produce over the last year. This has helped them to grow tremendously in this network and to easily place their messages, as has also happened in the case of WhatsApp, another basic channel for their communication and for the rise of their content, according to Gutiérrez-Rubí.
Mayor engagement with the contents
Communication through social networks has facilitated not only the viralisation of messages, but also interaction and connection with voters. "Whoever shares a party's content becomes a guarantor, an accomplice of that content before those personal contacts, because the important thing is not so much that the content reaches us, but that it is sent to us by someone we know, and those we know outweigh the credibility of the media and institutions by 18-20%", says the expert.
For its part, David ÁlvarezSocial Media analyst and consultant, admits that it is still too early to draw definitive conclusions about Vox's rapid expansion on social platforms, but he believes that "in terms of the growth of its communities and the engagement of these with the contents published by Santiago Abascal's party there is a notable difference in its favour with respect to the rest of the parties". However, this has already happened in the recent past with other parties such as Podemos and Ciudadanos.
Vox's strategy in these channels responds, as Álvarez says, to the generation of simple and direct messages with which its followers feel fully identified. However, the way in which these contents are presented is also very important, because "it depends on this that their communities are the ones that later lead their viralisation", he adds. For this reason, they resort to simple, emotionally based formats that are easy to share, not only on networks such as Facebook or Twitter, but above all on WhatsApp.
Analysis on Twitter
David Álvarez has analysed the new followers on Twitter that each party has gained over the last 30 days (in the context of the Andalusian elections) and a really curious fact is that the percentage of new accounts in the case of Vox is much lower than in the rest of the parties. Specifically, and according to their research, in this party it is 8.3% of the total number of followers gained, while in the other parties this percentage rises to 26%.
Barbara Yuste
Consultant at Proa Comunicación