Between analogue and digital: A critical exploration of strategic social media use in Greek election campaigns.

Abstract

Amidst the burgeoning literature on the use social media in electoral politics, there are still relatively few studies that seek to understand developments in digital campaigning from the inside. Drawing on 9 semi-structured interviews with Greek political communication consultants, we address this gap. Theoretically, we draw from Kreiss, Lawrence, & McGregor’ s analytical framework that seeks to account for the ways that campaigns perceive their candidates in relation to audiences, affordances, and genres of different social media platforms, as well as the timing of the electoral cycle, in order to effectively study strategic social media communication. Our findings show that Greek campaigns are embracing many social media but still have a relatively rudimentary understanding of the affordances of different platforms and their communicative cultures. Where campaign communication strategies are shaped by politicians, they typically favor one platform as a channel for all their content. Our findings demonstrate that different media systems and political cultures impact considerably on the adoption of digital communication strategiesand can be quite far from the highly professional and sophisticated American model. Findings are discussed in relation to ongoing debates around campaign professionalization and the role of platforms.