Navigating the 2024 Algorithm Election

Image credit: Red Dot via Unsplash

Political communication on social media seeks to change hearts and minds but the key issue for UK political parties in 2024 is being able to reach swing voters and communicate to different audiences on social media with the right approach to achieve that.

Social media has changed significantly since the last election. It’s now not just about building a network or buying impressions to reach and grab the attention of swing voters with ads but about the strength of content tactics that are deployed to engage audiences and generate earned visibility from social algorithms.

By leaning into the algorithms that now exist on platforms like TikTok and focusing too much on the content tactics that propel it, such as posting lo-fi humorous video content and memes with the hopes of engaging younger audiences, UK political parties risk neglecting the promotion of serious policies and may end up not actually changing too many hearts and minds this election.

TikTok is now a key platform for entertaining video content to go viral but the problem that UK political parties currently face is that this largely comes from content that is generated by amateur users on the platform gaining more traction than their own official political party organic content. 

Unlike other social platforms, political paid ads are not allowed on TikTok. As the reach of content on the app is not determined by network scale or paid impressions, amateur political content from general amateur users and creators is regularly outperforming content posted by the main political parties.

The result of this for UK political parties is unpredictability and a lack of control in their messaging which is not particularly useful for them. For example, footage from a Ring doorbell uploaded by a user of David Cameron filmed going door to door campaigning has outperformed and reached far more people than most official content and messaging from the Conservative party TikTok channel.

In adapting to the style of content that best holds attention and drives engagement on the app, anything official from political parties that leverages a content trend or is created in a meme style of format runs the danger of trivialising a very critical and important occasion for the country, or risks infantilising or inferring that politics needs over simplification. It can go wrong very easily, such as Suella Braverman’s take on the ‘Four Seasons Orlando Baby’ trend which was rather ill advised. 

For Labour, this risk is mitigated by a younger leaning audience on TikTok that are predominantly already on their side and keen for change, so any actual real success for Labour on the app might be seen more from younger audiences sharing TikTok content with older family members than engaging with the content themselves. This way, TikTok content may actually reach swing voters to change their hearts and minds instead of preaching to the choir.

However, despite being seen as doing quite well on TikTok, Labour may possibly be having to work harder than the Conservatives on other social platforms beyond TikTok in order to reach and convince swing voters as they are spending significantly much more on META platforms according to the current ‘Whotargetsme?’ data tracking political social spend.

The Conservative strategy does not seem to have as much resource dedicated to TikTok as Labour which is not too surprising and suggests that they are less concerned with reaching a similar audience but that they are still concerned enough to have some presence on the app.

For Conservatives, memes may come across as a bit of a half hearted attempt at winning over younger audiences that likely do not like them, so although this has been attempted to varying degrees of success, their general approach on TikTok is grounded in a much more traditional and approachable style aimed at older audiences that are now growing in number on the app. 

There is far too much content for any one audience to consume, even on just one social platform. The social landscape is now extremely fragmented and the overfocus this year on TikTok and short form video content during the election is a little misguided and doesn’t account for the power of other social platforms like Meta or X.

X remains of critical importance to UK political parties and has made a resurgence during the 2024 UK election campaign. It is really interesting that all of the main party leaders are frequently posting and deploying similar tactics to each other on the app.

X has been largely derided under Elon Musk since he took over the platform but it remains incredibly influential with traditional media sources and news journalists who continue to lean on it for providing them with news updates in real time, which has been key in this election and many before it.

Even if audiences are less active on the platform than they were in previous years, X is the platform that traditional news media focuses on the most and can most easily surface posts from on a TV news segment. Posts from X are frequently quoted or visualised on TV news as it is far easier for traditional news media to surface or quote or post of text based content from X than it is to give airtime to a piece of video content or having to provide additional context to a trend or meme.

All the political parties know that a post on X can influence key decision makers and news journalists much more easily than a TikTok currently could and because of this there is much greater potential for a post on X to be carried to swing voters.

Nigel Farage and Reform appear to have made the biggest impact on social media of any political party or politician this UK election. Reform are generating millions of Facebook reactions and they lead the way on X according to the latest Hootsuite data monitoring engagement for political content across platforms. The ‘content-graph’ algorithm powering TikTok is brilliant for reaching niche communities and fringe audiences and this is a key reason as to why Reform UK have seen such significant visibility and prominence on TikTok this election. Parties such as Reform or the Green Party were also much more active on TikTok pre-election and established accounts before Labour and the Conservatives joined the platform.

However, while they have large reach across social media platforms, Reform likely lack enough significant support across key constituencies with the current polls estimating they could win only a few seats. Ultimately, all of this tells us that although Reform’s target audience are super engaged on social platforms or Labour are winning with memes, it is unclear how this translates into real success this election. Winning the battle on social in the past has not resulted in being in power…