Calls to (what kind of?) action: A framework for comparing political actors’ campaign strategies across social media platforms

Abstract

Politicians can use social media to prompt citizens to engage by means of calls to action—statements, often in imperative form, that explicitly encourage audiences to take immediate action. This study makes a twofold contribution to this field: (1) Theoretically, we relate three factors shaping social media campaigns (audiences, affordances, genres) to calls to action related to three main campaign functions (information, mobilization, interaction). (2) Empirically, we show the applicability of this framework to systematic platform comparisons in the Western European context, taking the use of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter by political actors in Norway as an example. Conducting a standardized manual content analysis, we find that calls for certain kinds of action are more common than others, probably related to shortage of time and resources in election campaigns. Which calls to action are used is clearly affected by the platforms on which they are published.

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