Take Action Now! A Longitudinal Study of Political Party Calls to Action Across Social Media Platforms

Abstract

Online political campaigning takes place on several platforms, suggesting the need for those seeking voter support—such as political parties—to adapt to the characteristics of each platform. Getting voters to take action—be it online (such as asking them to engage with posts) or offline (such as asking them to attend rallies or to vote)—is a key element of campaigning efforts. Here, we focus on the use of what is referred to as calls to action as employed by Norwegian political parties on three different social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) between 2013 and 2024. Using a combination of automated and manual content analysis, the results indicate that while Facebook is the preferred platform for providing calls to action during roughly the first half of our time period, Instagram takes the lead in this regard for the latter half. Overall, though, we see a clear decrease of calls to action across all three platforms, indicating the changing priorities of parties. Using likes as a common measurement of engagement across all three studied platforms, posts containing calls to action emerged as less popular towards the end of the time period for Facebook and Twitter, while users of Instagram appear to be more interested in engaging with such posts also during these latter stages. The study ends with a discussion of the main findings, also suggesting some ways forward for future research efforts.