Reeling in the Voters? The Use of Instagram Reels by UK Parties

• In Event: Analyzing Political Campaign Strategies across Platforms

Abstract

In the past two decades, there has been a plethora of academic work which assessed the use of social media for political communication and campaigning by parties, party leaders and candidates (Bimber and Davis, 2003; Stromer-Galley, 2019; Gibson, 2020; Vaccari and Valeriani, 2021). However, despite some notable exceptions, (Lee and Campbell, 2016; Yang, Davis and Hindman, 2023) much of this work has focussed on text-based campaigning, despite growing evidence that parties now see visual communication in their social media campaigns as increasingly important (Southern, 2020). More broadly, we have also seen the ‘Tik-Tokification’ of social media in recent years (Abidin, 2022), with a proliferation of video-based communication on social media. Formally text or still image-based sites have adjusted their affordances to compete with this trend. Reels is the short-from video function on Instagram which was launched by Meta in 2020 as an answer to the meteoric rise of TikTok. TikTok has not been embraced by UK politicians or parties, with only a handful having adopted accounts. However, they have adopted Instagram Reels widely. With this in mind, this paper assesses the use of Instagram Reels by UK political parties.

The UK is an important case in this regard. Political advertising is not permitted in the UK, outside of a limited number of Party Election Broadcasts which are limited by number during elections and have extremely strict rules applied to them in terms of costs and content. Instagram Reels offers an opportunity to assess media which could be considered similar to the classic television advertising spots seen in other countries which permit political television advertising. It will also enable us to assess how parties are responding to the Tik-Tokification of social media and examine whether they are taking the opportunity to embrace this potentially impactful form of campaigning, especially in the context of a political system with such narrow scope for moving image campaigning.

Here, we content analyse every Reel posted by each mainstream UK party since the start of 2023 - 507 Reels thus far. These were coded by classic ‘Video-style’ (Kaid and Johnson, 2000) measures, such as presentation of candidate or leader and framing of policy or message. These measures were combined with variables added by the authors to capture potentially new dimensions of this type of campaigning, such as the use of memetic or viral content and humour, as well as capturing campaign functions such as calls to action, attacks, and mobilisation. Meta data on engagement and reach were also collected.

Pilot findings suggest that UK parties are using Reels as a boost to traditional media appearances, often sharing clips from news interviews and public affairs show appearances, suggesting a further embedding of the hybrid media system for political communication (Chadwick, 2017). They are also keen to incorporate humour and viral content, and this often boosts engagement and reach of the Reels, supporting earlier findings on the use of memes and political content (McLoughlin and Southern, 2021). However, there is little evidence of a large proportion of original content being produced by parties for their Reels, despite the opportunities this could afford them. This suggests UK Parties are currently somewhat unsure of how to respond to the rise of the moving image for social media campaigning and are approaching this with a large note of caution, preferring to reuse and boost traditional media content rather than spend resources incorporating this as a key plank of their campaigns. We note here however, that data collection is ongoing, and this could change once the general election campaign-proper begins.

Authors

• Rosalynd Victoria Southern, University of Liverpool

• Liam McLoughlin, University of Liverpool