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Political campaigning is increasingly undertaken by means of social media such as Facebook. Indeed, having content spread on Facebook by means of users sharing the posts of political parties and politicians has been pointed to as highly important. Based on suggestions from previous research, we investigate the relationship between shares and other Facebook post engagement opportunities such as comments and reactions. Formulating a series of hypotheses and research questions, a longitudinal study of the Norwegian political context is presented. The main findings show that while the Angry and Sad reactions emerge as positively related to the number of shares, Love and Care variations do not exhibit such clear relationships. Reviewing the findings in the light of previous scholarship, the results are interpreted as significative of the importance of negative emotions for online success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online communities have flourished in organizations in recent years, but large numbers of them fail. A deeper understanding of how participation can be promoted in online idea communities (OIC) is essential, because the most common reason of failure is low levels of participation. In this paper, we investigated how participation could be encouraged in an intra-organizational OIC. Our case organization was Sollentuna municipality in Sweden. They decided to introduce an OIC to collect ideas from staff as input when developing the municipality's forthcoming IT strategy. We used the theory of online identity-based communities (Ren, et al., 2007) as a lens and a mixed research method comprising interviews and an analysis of the content of the OIC. While this theoretical perspective certainly has merits on its own, the study topic at hand made it necessary to complement the theory with more specific design principles that take the unique characteristics of intra-organizational OIC into account. These included that managers were expected by staff to be core members of the community, frequent and complementing promotion activities were necessary in order for the OIC to be used, very low entry barriers were expected, and the employees expected the discussion to be focused, both in terms of content and time. The design principles need to be tested and further developed, by conducting studies on other OIC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social media have become key in contemporary political campaigns, different platforms feature differing affordances, allowing for varying functionalities. Even more importantly, different platforms are populated by different user groups. As Twitter has received large amounts of scholarly attention, comparisons of how and why different social media platforms are used for political communication are less abundant. This study looks at the differences between Twitter and Instagram as platforms for top politicians, describing and explaining how they allow for interaction with different types of audiences. The study gauges the interaction patterns emerging from activity undertaken by Norwegian party leaders on Twitter and Instagram during the 2017 Norwegian elections and shows how use of these two platforms differ not only in terms of the volume and structure of the activities — but also with regard to what types of other users the party leaders choose to interact with on the studied platforms and why we see differences between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adopting a longitudinal 'demand' perspective to the study of online political campaigning, the present study details developments in supporter engagement on party Facebook Pages during three Swedish elections -- 2010, 2014 and 2018. Specifically, the work presented here uncovers the roles of populism and platformization as ways of constructing political messages. Results indicate that over time, viral posts emerge as increasingly crafted based on the ever-changing affordances of the studied platform, evolving from text-based in 2010 to image-based in 2014 and emerging as primarily video-based in the 2018 elections. Implications for political campaigning are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media and their uses are in an almost constant flux, and the need for comparative approaches -- across platforms and time points -- appears as urgent. The study at hand presents a dual comparative approach looking into political communication as undertaken on social media. Presenting data from Twitter and Instagram use during the 2013 and 2017 Norwegian elections, the study traces developmental tendencies and suggests terminology with which to assess the ways that these activities are undertaken on the studied platforms. Results indicate that while Twitter and Instagram activity was rather differently fashioned in terms of structure and attention in 2013, these activities had grown more similar -- focused on political elites rather than a broader range of users -- in 2017. As such, the study argues for a normalized view of online political participation, wherein professionalized political actors appear to increasingly orchestrate the studied activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While early ideas surrounding the influence of the Internet on political participation and communication were often overtly optimistic, comparably recent years have seen the rise of online hate speech and similar issues gaining influence in a variety of online spheres. The study presented here seeks to detail the impact of positive ('thumbs-up') and negative ('thumbs-down') feedback on the popularity of politically themed YouTube videos, uploaded during the 2017 Norwegian parliamentary election. Given the apparent dearth of studies on YouTube in this regard, the insights provided here furthers our understanding regarding the drivers of online popularity during election campaigns. Specifically, results indicate that while commenting on uploaded videos appear as related to the 'thumbs-up' variety, video view count appear as more clearly related to the dismissive 'thumbs-down' feedback option. Discussing these results, the final section of the paper also provides a few suggestions for future research efforts in this vein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines citizens’ interactions with politicians in social media in what is referred to as an everyday context, unmediated by news media. Through a representative survey, we compare the influence of a series of socio-demographical variables such as political interest, age, gender and education on the interaction levels between citizens and politicians. The article argues that the social media logic can be operationalized into “connected affordances”: Redistribution, Interacting and Acknowledging — which are the three types of user practices on Facebook and Twitter. The study finds that Facebook is a service where “ordinary” people engage in political interaction with politicians — and receive replies from politicians — while Twitter is mostly used by just a small group of the population for these purposes. Hence, the popularity of Facebook could be seen as allowing for new connections between citizens and politicians without news media as mediators. Our results suggest that the stronger the political interest the citizens express, the more connective affordances are utilized — such as commenting and sharing. Political interest also impacts what response citizens receive from political actors in social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comparative study on two Twitter campaigns that came under pressure when recipients started to engage in the campaigns in unexpected ways. Despite two organizations employing different engagement strategies with users, both campaigns played out in somewhat similar ways. Users with an abundance of retweets tend to be male, holding privileged positions in society, with large networks of followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than a decade, researchers have shown interest in how politicians make use of the Internet for a variety of purposes. Based on critical assessments of previous online political communication scholarship, this paper identifies a series of overlooked areas of research that should be of interest for researchers concerned with how politicians make use of online technologies. Specifically, three such research opportunities are introduced. First, we suggest that research should attempt to move beyond dichotomization, such as conceiving of the Internet as either bringing about revolutionary changes or having a normalizing effect. Second, while there is a considerable body of knowledge regarding the activity of politicians during election campaigns, relatively little is known about the day-to-day communicative uses of the Internet at the hands of politicians. The third section argues that as political communication research has typically focused on national or international levels of study, scholars within the field should also make efforts to contribute to our knowledge of online practices at the hands of politicians at regional and local levels -- something we label as studies at the micro level. In synthesizing the literature available regarding the use of the Internet at the hands of politicians, the paper concludes suggesting routes ahead for interested scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study on Twitter use by SJ, the national Swedish train operator. The aim of the study is to investigate how SJ (known on Twitter under the handle @SJ_AB) made use of the platform at hand to communicate with customers during the tumultuous Christmas season of 2010. The paper features an analysis of an extensive data set containing 3,394 tweets tagged as relevant and archived during the winter of 2010/11. Findings show that while SJ are indeed utilizing Twitter to communicate with their customers, the discerned communicative patterns are mostly pertaining to what is described as an "office hour"--approach -- making use of the Twitter platform in a way that largely conforms to established routines of organizational communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]