The Implications of Facebook in Political Marketing Campaigns in Croatia

In the young Croatian democracy, there is a necessary role of the strategic approach to the political marketing communication campaigns, especially in using the new media, social networks and Facebook, being the most representative one. This paper aims to analyse to what degree the political parties use Facebook, how they manage this, and the opinions and viewpoints of the voters. This study has two major goals: to analyse how the leading political parties in Croatia use and manage social media services, particularly Facebook, and to evaluate perspectives of the Croatian voters regarding social media during political campaigns. Two instruments were created based on the secondary research: a protocol for in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with the social media specialists of the leading Croatian political parties (n = 3) and a survey of voters (n = 557), ranging in age from 18-45 years (78.1%), 46-55 years (14.7%), 56-65 years (6.1%) and older than 66 (1.1%). Croatian political parties do not use Facebook's entire potential. The respondents who vote regularly believe that the political parties' Facebook pages are significant in their promotion and visit these pages more frequently. These pages are visited more frequently during political campaigns. It is imperative to focus on increased quality and more frequent communication, direct communication and turning to young people in the campaigns. There are statistically significant differences with regard to age on the issue of voting. Croatian political parties can improve the potential of social networks, primarily Facebook, in election campaigns.Implications for a Central European audience: In addition to the specified deficiencies of the Facebook pages, the voters provided suggestions for improving the Facebook content and increasing page visits. When used in combination with other social media, Facebook has the strongest potential for influencing the young voters. The results indicate the need for professional management of relevant social media strategies and tactics. The improvements of the Facebook pages can be grouped in several categories, the most important being "Content", "Communication" and "Strategy". The improvements would yield more frequent visits by the potential voters.