An Examination of Online Electoral Campaigning in Tanzania

Abstract

The rise of social media networks (SNS) should be celebrated as signalling era of online campaign after decades of old-style traditional campaign. The first wide use of SNS for mobilising voters was by President Obama during the 2008 United States Presidential election. This paper examined a correlation between Facebook campaign engagements of presidential candidates in the 2015 Tanzania election and the number of votes they garnered. We examined Facebook pages over a period of two months. Our empirical findings show that some presidential candidates participate significantly in Facebook campaigning, however, they differ in number of followers, posts, likes, shares, comments and votes. Some candidates were rarely exposed to Facebook. Some were active. Yet there was little evidence, Facebook activities were a game changer to the shares of votes. Nonetheless, we found out that candidates who had Facebook pages trounced those without Facebook pages in the shares of votes.