Following on from my post last night about election campaigns and such, I thought it would be funny interesting to see how the parties were using Facebook as a means to communicate directly to New Zealanders.
Facebook is an interesting platform to advertise on. It is free to set up a fan page or group page you have people declaring their support publicly for a certain politician or party and the pages are very easy to edit, update and manipulate.
I found the easiest place to start was to find the “Browse all Politicians” page which lists the fan pages of politicians in order of supporters. Of course most of the politicians on this page are American, because pretty much everyone in America has Facebook.
Top 10 politicians according to Facebook
Barack Obama: 1,219,305 supporters (biggest supporters page on FB)
John McCain: 182,176 supporters
Hillary Clinton: 160,466 supporters
Ron Paul: 92,422 supporters
Michelle Obama: 61,565 supporters
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: 58,056 supporters
Wen Jai-bao: 55,829 supporters
Mike Huckabe: 52,280 supporters
Mitt Romney: 35,909 supporters
John Edwards: 31361 supporters
Honourable mentions that come before any New Zealand Politicians:
Arnold Schwarzenegger: 27,671
Boris Johnson: 13,595
Mohammed Ali Jinnah: 9,649
King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud: 6,368
John Key
The highest ranked New Zealand politician is John Key who has 4,927 supporters. The page is pimped out with an RSS feed, video box, links to all the parties main websites, photos of John Key (because you can never get enough of them!) and a sweet as discussion board. John Key’s FB page is a a good place where people can get information about what he and the Nats are doing, and find links to policy and other information.
Helen Clark
Helen Clark is miles behind on 1,833 supporters. Her page is slightly bigger than John Key’s but has a whole lot more photo and video content available. It also has links to major party websites and the electoral commission. There is no RSS feed on the page but the notes section looks like it is updated semi-regularly.
There were no other New Zealand politicians with fan pages that had over 500 fans, and by the 14th page of profiles my eyes were starting to glaze…
The Greens
The Greens were the only party to have a supporters page (that was easy to find) on FB. They have 619 fans. The page has an RSS feed from Frogblog as well as links to all the major party websites. There is a YouTube box on there and heaps of photo and most importantly a tab for upcoming events.
Fan pages are important because parties can push information out, and make the page a hub for communication of policy and propaganda. They put you in touch with like minded people and allow a variety of multimedia resources to be at the potential voters finger tips.
Group pages however are a bit different. They are less adaptable than supporters pages, you cannot add applications onto them, and they feel a bit old now that the supporters pages are being used.
However some of the parties seem to unofficial groups of Facebook. National has two groups, one with 42 members, and the other with 32. There is also a page called: Wait, was that a National Party policy? No no, such a thing doesn’t exist with 68 supporters.
Labour had a decent group site with 293 members, United Future have a supporters group page with 14 supporters and ACT had 10. but the Green party was over all winner with 322 members of its group. In saying that however the Don’t vote Labour group page had 606 members.
Facebook is an easy way for parties to put information out there to people who may otherwise be politically apathetic or ignorant. Although I’m not sure about that ACT ads from the last post. I got a different one today which told me that instead of voting National, I should vote ACT because National are pussy’s.
Also Facebook is open to abuse. I mean there are lots of humorous pages, like Winston Peters for Prime Minister, and this one which I just found:
John Keys
John Keys seems to be a parody of John Key… anyways here is the link. Have fun Facebooking!