A seat in Facebook: politics 2.0, viral marketing and social networks

Abstract

The growth of social networks all over the world forces to the organisations to have presence in the network to be able to create and conserve stable relations with the users -trying achieving their loyalty and fidelity-, so that they recommend products to other users using technicians and mechanisms of viral expansion. What about in politics? The political actors’ pro-activity, like the president Obama’s campaign, or the receptors activity, such as in the recent events in Egypt, revalidate the on-line personal intercommunication like a new support of informative flows, showing the transformation of the classical forms of social relation. This study investigates the 350 Spanish congressmen’ profiles in Facebook in order to analyze the level of virtual interactiveness, define the strategies of targeting and the dynamics of use of the new stage of communication for the political action in a field used by 7,5 million active users daily in Spain.