How journalists should track politicians on social media0

• Diplo Learning Corner, Public diplomacy
• 16th May 2019

Around election times, monitoring politicians on social media comes to the forefront. We analysed in the past how creating buzz on social has helped or harmed political candidates in the United States, France, and Finland.
This spring, we’ve taken unprecedented effort to capture the entire spectrum of political hopefuls by adding almost 1000 candidates into our election filter. There are party leaders and official party pages, plus virtually everyone with a public page on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram who is running for a seat in the Finnish parliament this spring. (Over 400 candidates have no public pages on social media at all.)
You can find both filters in Trending: Eduskuntavaalit 2019, Eduskuntavaalit Puoluejohtajat 2019.

How to make sense of filters where you’re tracking politicians?

1. Quickly see which politician’s own posts are noticed on social media.

What might be surprising is that it’s not always party leaders who get the most engagement. Social media candidates with..

50% of all news posts on Instagram are serious0

• Diplo Learning Corner, Public diplomacy
• 14th May 2019

Combining both sets of posts gives us a very neat split of 20 Entertainment stories, 40 Viral, and 60 Serious.