One political party is dominating social media - but it's not the one spending the most

In terms of getting the most social media interactions, Reform is far outperforming the other parties. That's despite it being one of the "smallest and least formally organised".

Tom Cheshire

Online campaign correspondent @chesh

Tuesday 25 June 2024 03:57, UK

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There are two ways to reach voters online: pay for your adverts to end up in front of them - or produce content yourself that gets attention.

Throughout the election, we've been tracking the first of those. Labour have been the big digital spenders, with the Conservatives second, and then everyone else a very distant third.

But throwing money at it doesn't necessarily fix the attention problem. And actually, some of those spending the least are getting the most interactions.

Reform is doing by far and away the best on that metric. This is based on data from CrowdTangle, a social media tracking tool that analyses engagement - how many times someone has seen a post or commented on it. The chart above shows which parties' posts got the most total interactions on Facebook.

"Despite being one of the smallest and least formally organised parties, Reform has dominated on Facebook in terms of organic interactions," says Kate Dommett, professor of digital politics at the University of Sheffield.

"This could be put down to the parties having different numbers of followers, but Reform UK and Labour have nearly identical numbers of page followers, suggesting that Reform is having greater success in getting a response."

And it's important to look at the growth or otherwise that these parties are having on those pages.

Reform is seeing the most page growth, with 32,000 new followers.

The Conservative Party by comparison has seen much slower growth, just 0.08%. That's only 596 more people clicking follow over the course of the election, speaking to a sputtering campaign.

But the stats themselves hide some important differences. Because an interaction could be a like, it could even be 'love' - but it might also be a frown.

We ranked posts based on the amount of 'love' reactions they got.

Nigel Farage's post when he announced his candidacy is the most popular so far, with nearly 12,000 'loves'.

Sixteen of the top 20 most-loved posts were from Mr Farage.

The second most-loved post was from Rishi Sunak, where he told followers you don't need to go to university to succeed in life.

And that shows some of the ambiguity. This post incidentally also got the most amount of 'haha' emoji reactions. And if we look into the comments, we can see the types of comments of how it went down.

"Totally true! Simply marry a billionaire like Rishi here and you too can have your own swimming pool regardless of your education," wrote a lady called Fran.

Tsareena Brown commented: "True. Marrying into a billionaire's family will do just fine."

We're assuming here that they're laughing 'at' rather than laughing with.

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And in fact, 11 of the 20 posts with the most laughs were from either Rishi Sunak or his party.

But Labour also struggles to cut through online.

The Keir Starmer post with the highest interactions - a lengthy, emotional message to his followers about his mum - was liked only 1,922 times…

Even that's not bad.

For all of Ed Davey's social-friendly campaign content, his online presence doesn't appear to be getting a great deal of 'love'.

Still not as wet as Rishi Sunak, the post says - a nod to that election announcement outside Number 10 in the pouring rain. 

But it's not got a whole lot of love either. This post was only shared 45 times, and 'loved' 27 times. 

Such is the fate of most political posts: they leave little trace.

"Of the 2,138 posts made so far in the election campaign, most receive little response. On average posts have 1,387 interactions, and 538 posts had less than 100 interactions," Professor Dommett points out.

"So parties are putting out a lot of political content that isn't getting much of a response."

One political party is dominating social media - but it's not the one spending the most

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