Personalisation Styles of German Politicians on Facebook

The next speaker in this ICA 2018 session is Manon Metz, who points out the use of social media by politicians in order to circumvent conventional mass media. This creates an era of permanent personalised campaigning, but the level of personalisation still varies considerably across different contexts.

We must therefore distinguish between the personalisation, privatisation, and emotionalisation of politicians’ social media profiles; to what extent are such forms of self-personalisation present, and to what extent do they engage the audience? The present study examined this for the Facebook of the leading party candidates in Germany.

Generic personalisation retains a professional focus; privatisation adds aspects of the private life of these candidates; and emotionalisation adds further emotional elements to the profile. These were assessed for the Facebook profiles of the candidates, and audience engagement with these profiles was also measured.

Professional personalisation was most prominent, but followed closely by emotionalisation, while privatisation was far less prominent. Posts including images were more strongly personalised, across all three forms of personalisation. Emotionalisation generated more audience engagement, while privatisation only generates more positive sentiment from audiences, but not increased audience engagement.