Social Media Messaging Types by US Gubernatorial Candidates

Up next in this AoIR 2015 session is AoIR president Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the social media use of US gubernatorial candidates. Their tweeting activities are linked of course to the very lengthy US electoral process from surfacing candidates through primaries and nominating conventions to the elections themselves.

Most of the research into social media use during these elections tends to aggregate general election messaging, but this is strongly affected by a variety of external factors, too. There are some fairly established rhythms of general elections: from early strategic messaging through mid-campaign debates and mobilisation to end-game reinforcement and mobilisation activities. Incumbents and challengers may act differently during these elections, and the social media platforms' affordances will also matter.

This project draws on data for 36 state elections during 2014, focussing on Twitter as well as on Facebook and following the candidates' accounts and profiles. These messages were categorised as strategic messages about candidates and their themes, calls to action in support of the campaign, informative messages, conversational messages (replies), and ceremonial messages. These were identified by manual and automated coding.

On Facebook, calls to action were especially prominent in the final days of the election; otherwise, strategic messages, calls to action, and informative messages were relatively evenly distributed. On Twitter, strategic messaging is much more prominent, and it as well as calls to action are especially strong in the final days. This means that platforms matter – campaigning activities may be very different across different spaces.

Also, challengers produce substantially more messages than incumbents, and this seems especially pronounced for strategic messaging. This is independent from which party candidates belong to, actually.