Instagram and political marketing. Vox Party election campaign 2019

Abstract

The use of social networks for political communication purposes has become widespread in recent years, in parallel with the growing presence of these networks in our lives. In this study we are going to focus on the use Vox has made of social networks to get closer to voters and get the largest number of followers of all the parties that are involved in the national electoral panorama of the year 2019. The specific network used by Vox for his political marketing has been Instagram. Instagram is a social network with great implantation among certain sectors of the population, especially among young people of voting age, and there are more and more studies being done on its use in political communication. In this work we seek to find some of the keys that explain how the use of this network by Vox, a party until then with very little presence in public life, contributed to this political actor breaking into the Spanish scene with force, being the party with the most followers on Instagram during the two electoral campaigns of 2019. We examine the characteristics of Vox messages on Instagram during the two electoral processes for the Spanish Parliament of 2019, comparing both campaigns. The study of this case, applying content analysis to its messages, allows us to observe that Vox has been able to generate its own agenda without hardly having a presence in the conventional media. The publications show a clear intention of personalizing the party and showing a position of equality before the citizen. The messages seek to give them a feeling of closeness. In the second campaign, progress in the professionalization of the communication department is noted, after increasing its budget by obtaining political representation, making more publications, of higher quality and with more post-production.