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    Re: Matt Zarb Cousin article in times Archived Message

    Posted by Ken Waldron on December 23, 2019, 6:19 pm, in reply to "Matt Zarb Cousin article in times"

    In 2017 Labour won Facebook, but now they are outdated and outgunned

    Something more fundamental shifted between 2017 and 2019 that the instant post-mortems of Labour’s disappointing election performance haven’t adequately addressed. Jeremy Corbyn’s surge in popularity in the 2017 campaign meant the Tories begrudgingly had to accept the public didn’t dislike him as much as the Conservative party did. They recognised that they needed to commit an all-out assault on his approval ratings in order to win a majority. In 2019, when an ever declining number of people consume broadcast media, forcing your opponent into a strategic misstep in SW1 or briefing a story to the press isn’t enough to persuade people. Attacks now have to be amplified on social media with targeted content that is also shareable, so once the communities the party wants to influence have been reached, more of their target audience are engaged via the “social endorsement” of a Facebook like or share. Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s highly shareable video content in 2017 meant, even without targeting, its virality had it reach and persuade the right people.

    But Facebook’s algorithm change in early 2018 shifted the landscape: it meant more content from friends in news-feeds instead of from pages people liked, and also boosting videos that are watched for longer. This meant organic sharing of content developed outside of the party and by Jeremy Corbyn’s team in the leader’s office could no longer compensate for deficiencies elsewhere. While there were attempts to generate viral, persuadable content – four of the top ten most shared videos of the campaign were developed by Real Change Lab, Momentum or Corbyn’s team, and Jeremy Corbyn achieved multiple times the shares and retweets of all his rivals – this remained incidental to the party’s core strategy and so was not adequately resourced. Meanwhile the Labour party itself appeared to base its approach on the Tory digital strategy of 2015: spending £1.5 million on Facebook, but largely advertising content that was neither shareable nor persuasive. In fact, while the Tories almost caught up with Labour’s official channels, Labour’s own organic content gained half the views on Facebook it had in 2017. By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn’s content had almost five times the views and three times the shares on Facebook as the entire Labour party but with a fraction of the ad spend. The party’s approach appeared to be based on the received wisdom from the 2015 campaign that social media is an “echo chamber” and to reach undecided voters you needed to pay. However, the data now shows this to be untrue. For example, through organic sharing alone over ten million people watched the video of Rob Delaney talking about the NHS that was published on Jeremy Corbyn’s social media channels, with thousands of people in key marginals who had never even interacted with Corbyn’s Facebook page sharing the video. In fact, almost 80 per cent of the people Labour paid to reach through Corbyn’s page were also reached organically by his viral content. But over the course of the whole campaign, Corbyn still only managed just 50 per cent more video views than in 2017, compared to an almost seven-fold improvement on Twitter.

    To cut through on Facebook, the algorithm now demands even more shareable, longer, engaging content that people watch to the end. The party needs to properly invest in developing such content lines. And there is no point spending millions on targeting content at people that is not going to persuade them, or precipitate the social endorsement that comes with people sharing that content to their Facebook friends. The Conservative party understands this. They learnt the lessons of 2017, developing viral content such as “Brexit, Actually” while they gamed Facebook’s algorithm by posting full length “car crash” interviews of Labour politicians, knowing their core supporters would watch it to the end meaning it would get boosted by the platform. Instead of static images with links, their “Get out the Vote” ads featured tailored selfie videos of Boris Johnson himself talking directly to voters of each target marginal. They also had a network of surrogate Facebook pages that appeared apolitical, such as “Parents’ Choice” and “Right To Rent, Right To Buy, Right To Own”, which focused on delegitimising Labour policies, while building online communities in marginal constituencies so substantial they could dictate the terms of discussion. Crucially, Boris Johnson benefited from Leave.EU’s Facebook reach where they did not mobilise behind Theresa May.

    While there is an early consensus emerging among Labour’s leadership candidates that the policy prospectus was popular but it lacked the message or adequate message carrier, it is crucial that candidates commit to overhauling the party’s approach to Facebook. The Left must capitalise on the growth of social media, especially given most of the newspapers are set against the Labour party. It will be integral to any strategy to win an election in 2024, and the work to catch up with the Tories must start now. Leadership candidates that fail to recognise this haven’t got a serious plan.

    https://www.facebook.com/100002921841950/posts/2553424501431586/?d=n

    Some discussion on his twitter account:

    https://twitter.com/mattzarb/status/1207934401700663296

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