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• Social media in the french presidential elections, 2012

On the 22nd of April and 6th of May 2012 were held the French presidential elections. France being a two-round system, the acting president Nicolas Sarkozy lost to François Hollande 48.4% to 51.6% in the second voting round. The campaign for the presidency was a turning point in the French politics, with social media holding a significant place in every candidate's political strategy. As a new form of communication social media is mobilized by politicians, organizations and governments to increase visibility connect with a larger public and present their political stands. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are rapidly becoming an important source of information for the general public, in 2012, 40% of the French population informs itself through the Internet. Politicians are thus required to be active on social media to appeal to a younger generation of voters. In 2012 the four presidential nominees with the most followers on both Facebook and Twitter were, François Hollande with more than 220,000 followers on Twitter, Nicolas Sarkozy with 150,000 Twitter followers, François Bayrou with 100,000 Twitter followers and Marine Le Pen with 63,000 followers. French parties have followed the trend and become more active on social media also, creating their Facebook and Twitter accounts at the moment of the election. The most present on social media is the National Front, the conservative right-wing party led by Marine Le Pen.

Social media and politics

The dynamic of social media and politics evolved before the French elections and has restructured the international political scene. Since the rise of digital diplomacy and Barack Obama's use of social media in the 2008 american presidential elections the political discourse has shifted to the digital sphere.

Digital diplomacy

The term digital diplomacy or eDiplomacy invokes the use of Internet as a tool to aid political communication and diplomatic relations. In 2012 there has been a surge in the use of social media by diplomats. Facebook and Twitter are considered crucial in a diplomat’s political career to obtain power and to interact with the public community, as did Hugo Chávez when campaigning through Twitter, using his digital followers to ensure his re-election in 2012. In addition to helping gain and maintain power, the social media and especially Twitter has been mobilized by government officials to create a virtual sphere where foreign countries can interact and their policy be available to foreign populations to enable better communication in the world. A digital diplomacy represents the diplomatic relationships and procedures that exist in the political sphere recreated on the digital main frame. With the evolution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s), governments can communicate with Twitter and Facebook in addition to the traditional media. A benefit to the politics through social media is the two-way stream dialogue that allows followers and diplomats to discuss on political issues, thus creating a worldwide virtual agora. Indeed individuals can comment on tweets and Facebook posts and engage in a conversation with world leaders through their accounts.

Influence of american elections

In 2008, Barack Obama knew that “If he engaged in campaign politics as usual, he knew he’d lose”. He then modeled his campaign with the help of his digital advisers to reflect the new media outlets such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. Barack Obama had many more Twitter “followers” and Facebook “friends” than his Republican rival John McCain and was a more connected presidential candidate. His understanding of social media was seen as a model to following presidential candidates around the world and started a new type of campaigning. Taking advantage of the social media, Barack Obama was able to achieve an offline mobilization winning all the key states in America. Some critics suggest that Obama’s success in the elections rests on the evolution of social media. His 2012 campaign followed the same strategy and expanded on new apps and sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, Foursquare, Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) and the Obama for America mobile app. Having a presence on all social media was crucial for the essence of his campaigns. The campaign used YouTube’s platform to publish advertisements which saved more money than televised adverts and his YouTube account became the first viewed politician account on the website. His @BarackObama twitter account, active since 2007 accumulated more than 15 million followers in 2012 making it one of the top followed Twitter accounts on the platform. The politician’s official campaign website, barackobama.com was updated for the 2012 campaign adding a dashboard where Obama’s supporter could organize local events invite potential Obama supporters and send reports to the Obama campaign of the local political profile. Barack Obama’s campaign was practical, economic and successful in mobilizing the online community to attract supporters and potential voters during both presidential campaigns.

Previous French digital examples

2007 Presidential elections

The 2007 French presidential election between socialist candidate Ségolène Royal and center-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy is considered as a precedent in the relation between Internet and politics. The candidates chose to make use of Internet’s potential and create websites and online communities to a certain extent. Ségolène Royal, the current minister of ecology, sustainable development and Energy ran for presidency in 2007 announcing her bid after launching her campaign site Désirs d’Avenir. The site was an interactive platform where her supporters could engage in debates through forums. Her web team composed of volunteer students including her son, Thomas Hollande created a second site Segoleneroyal.fr as a main campaign profile site where could be found videos and her political program. Segolene Royal built an internet community and held a considerate part of her campaign on Internet which led to the term “Ségosphère”. This term refers to the online community that flourished after the launch of Desir d’Avenir. Royal’s partisans created blogs and supporting sites to aid in her campaign effort. It also alludes to Royal herself and her web team’s online campaign strategies. Ségolène Royal and her web team spent more than 860 000 euros on the realization of her different sites. In 2007, Internet started to take an interesting place in the dynamic of politics and communication strategies but the campaigns still relied immensely on traditional media.

2012 Campaigns

François Hollande

Following François Hollande’s victory in the socialist party primary elections, his web campaign directed by Fleur Pellerin and Vincent Feltesse created two websites, FrancoisHollande.fr the candidate’s main campaign site and TousHollande.fr a supporting website.
FrancoisHollande.fr is centered on François Hollande’s political activities, campaign efforts and program. To keep the site attractive and innovative, it contains a multimedia, donation, upcoming events and a social media section.
TousHollande.fr acts as an activist website with the motto “Act for a change” echoing Hollande’s slogan “Change is now”. A web specialist described the initiative as “activism with one click”. The website reproduces the dashboard from the Obama website encouraging supporters to organize events, endorse Hollande and campaign locally. Like the main campaign website it links to other social media sites of the campaign like backstage pictures on Instagram or the campaign’s official playlist on Deezer.

Many tend to believe that one of the factor to François Hollande's success in the elections is his tactical use of social media to promote his policies. Out of all the candidates François Hollande had the most followers on Twitter, 224,000 making him the top French political account. Even by being the top candidate on a social point of view, the amount of strategy put digital communication is still far behind that seen in the American presidential campaign. The candidate's digital communication strategy had a budget of 2 thousand euros and was managed by 50 media specialists and about 150 bloggers in charge of the candidate's web page, Twitter account and other social media accounts on Facebook, Google+ and Dailymotion.

The Hollande digital campaign managed to counter the strict database rule in France that allows parties to store information only with the consent of the individual, through the email list built during the primaries. This database enabled a more personal approach with newsletters and personalized emails.

Nicolas Sarkozy

At the time of the elections, Nicolas Sarkozy was the incumbent president and candidate for the center right. His web campaign focused on Facebook, where his digital team created a timeline presenting his personal skills and presidential achievements. The timeline was published a couple of days before his announcement to run a second term. His web team managed to transfer his subscribers to the upgraded campaign page and Nicolas Sarkozy obtained 560.000 fans rapidly. The welcome message invited his subscribers to participate by posting videos, pictures and comments through Facebook Messenger that would put them in contact with the campaign team. This method could make President Sarkozy appear approachable. The timeline was subject to criticism after the other candidates received a lesser version of the Facebook campaign page, following a long wait. Facebook was accused of favoritism and after claims that they put more tools at the dispositions of the French president and his campaign. Other criticisms point out the lack of transparency in his 700 picture timeline which omitted elements of his past. Nicolas Sarkozy is also active on Twitter even though he had less popularity than Francois Hollande on the platform, he tweeted moments of the campaign and signed “NS” when actually the author of the tweet. Sarkozy is present on different social media websites such Instagram that he uses to show an enthusiastic and active candidate.

Both his Facebook timeline and Twitter page were turned into a parody by the opposition. The facebook page lavraietimeline.fr rewrote political events like Kaddafi’s visit to the Elysee and painted them in a satirical twist. A Twitter page now retitled Nicolas Sarkozy Fake also gave false information pretending to be the official page of the president.

Marine Le Pen

When Marine Le Pen took on as leader, her goal was to break the outdated and extremist reputation that Jean-Marie Le Pen's era had grown to have in France. Marine Le Pen took on social media as a main outlet for communicating with her supporters, comforting the rivalry between the traditional media and her party. She states her party has been demonized by the media many times; the social media platform represents a new beginning for her party and can reach a younger population that is not familiar with the party’s past.
Marine Le Pen and her party are inseparable entities, which was translated in her candidate website and the party’s website. The party’s website was put to use in the campaign as it linked to her different social media websites. The party also created supporting websites with different objectives like fnj-midi-pyrenees.fr which was a local site. Every site connected to Marine Le Pen’s campaign links to diverse social media platforms including Spotify, Flickr, YouTube, Dailymotion, Facebook and Twitter, the links are displayed in front page to have maximum visibility.
Dailymotion is the French version of YouTube, which explains why French presidential candidates mainly posted on Dailymotion and put less focus on YouTube. Marine Le Pen took both platforms and utilized them as a substitute to television and broadcasted her campaign messages on the sites. The video support is likely to fit her supporters who she describes as the “forgotten” or “invisible” partisans because it doesn’t come from biased media.

National Front

The National Front is the number one french party on social media. It is connected to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Dailymotion and Flickr. It has the most followers on Twitter than any other french political party and uses its lead on social media to reinstate it's image. The National Front's take on social media aided in reaching out to french youth, it has the most active youth in politics called the Front National Jeunesse choosing Twitter as a main platform of action. The objective was to normalise and rejuvenate the party and make it more approachable. The party understood the importance of social media to communicate with their party members in the early stages of the election and crafted their websites to fit the demand of digital activity. Althought the party never directly tweeted but worked on the basic of retweets, the political discourse was left to supporting pages such as the Front National Jeunesse, where the dialogue was held. The 2012 official party website linked all social media connected to the party on the front page of the website so that the members and everybody can stay connected at all times.

Limits

The 2012 French presidential election was the first time in French politics that all candidates mobilized social media and made it a component of their communication strategy. Taking inspiration from the Obama 2008 campaign the candidates copied the display and idea of the digital campaign that he had run without taking in account the work required behind such an online campaign. François Hollande was the digital candidate of the race and many give his efficient use of the internet as credit for his success in the elections. But critics point out that the front runners of the elections missed the opportunity to make a real difference in the campaign by exhausting the potential of social media. To start the politicians did not manage interaction with the supporters correctly, Francois Hollande might have reproduced Barack Obama’s idea of a dashboard to help supporters volunteer in the political effort but the pages lacked of listening tools. The conversation on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms was a one-way stream and did truly engage in conversations with the electorate.
Social media was used as an additional platform to the traditional media and not seen as needing a specific approach. The critics find that the web campaigns did not adapt their messages to each platform.

Also statistics comparing Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy’s Twitter performance to that of Barack Obama saw that the French candidates tweeted an average of 35 times per day compared to a 2.1 average for Obama. The higher number of tweets would show a misunderstanding of the function of Twitter. Further statistics show that in 2012 Barack Obama had more than 15 million followers compared to Francois Hollande’s 329 300 followers and Sarkozy’s 235 000 followers, when Obama opened his account in 2007, three years before Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy opened his in 2012 four years after Hollande. Critics show that an online community is not built in a couple of months and Francois Hollande’s account is inactive when not in the campaign season.