PE 2023: (Short-form) Attention is all you need?
Short-form videos featured heavily in the social media quest for eyeballs and attention during the 2023 Presidential Election in Singapore. Signs are that future political candidates will have master the art of snappy video clips if they want to make an outsized online impact.
DESPITE the rise of TikTok in recent years, the quest for eyeballs and online attention in Singapore’s recently concluded Presidential Election was still fought primarily on Facebook (FB), the largest legacy social media platform.
But the immense popularity of short-form videos —particularly in President-elect Tharman Shanmugaratnam’s winning campaign — suggests that other political candidates will have to master this particular format for future elections.
These snappy, under-90s-seconds clips accounted for nearly 70% of all interactions Mr Tharman received on his public Facebook page between August 11–30, the period where the election was formally announced and official campaigning ended.
The 87 short-form videos that Mr Tharman’s campaign posted on FB Reels during this period garnered more user interaction than those from the 248 FB posts across all formats by Mr Tan Kin Lian, who had the second highest interaction numbers on FB.
To be clear, success on social media doesn’t necessarily translate to strong results at the polls, as we’ll see later in this article. But the data is unambiguous: there is no ignoring the short-from video format favored by users and social media companies alike.
FB: Old But Still Gold. For Now
The social media landscape in 2023 is increasingly fragmented, but candidates for the 2023 Presidential Election still concentrated their efforts primarily on FB, the biggest legacy platform. FB was where all three candidates were equally active despite the clear disparity in their audience base.
In contrast, Mr Tan was largely inactive on Instagram (IG), though the platform is widely seen as being indispensable in reaching out to a younger audience
All 3 candidates were active on TikTok, and it is particularly striking to see how Mr Ng Kok Song, a newcomer to the political scene, built such a large following on the platform within a short period of time. But videos posted on TikTok by the candidates appeared to be mostly generic short-form videos that they had posted on other platforms as well, rather than TikTok-specific content.
In other words, none of them went viral with their dance moves or surviving some silly online “challenge”. Singaporeans will have to wait a few more years for their first “TikTok election”.
FB remained the key platform where the candidates made news, sometimes for the wrong reasons, or responded to online rumors about their families.
Data And Caveats
The charts and tables in this article are based on 514 FB posts by the three candidates, Mr Tharman, Mr Tan, and Mr Ng, between August 11, when the Writ of Election was issued, and August 30, the final day of official campaigning.
I chose not to include FB data from June and July when “unofficial campaigning” took place as social media data has a very limited shelf life, particularly for elections.
The data was collected via CrowdTangle, FB’s own social monitoring tool. I manually added the Reels data for the 3 candidates, as CrowdTangle did not capture that data for some reason.
Definitions:
- “Total Interaction” on Facebook is defined as the sum of “Likes”, “Shares”, “Comments” and the six emotions that users can choose to express themselves: “Love”, “Wow”, “Haha”, “Sad”, “Angry”, or “Care”.
- To keep things simple, no weight was assigned to each form of user interaction.
Caveats:
- There is no way, publicly at least, to separate FB interactions originating in Singapore from those overseas. Even for data within Singapore, there is no way to tell if the user is a voter or not.
- User interaction on the candidates’ FB pages is just a small fraction of overall interaction on the platform, such as those posted by the mainstream media outlets or private posts by their friends and network.
- Social media data is very noisy and can be manipulated in many ways. It is not a crystal ball, and cannot be relied upon for predicting granular real-world outcomes.
- Not all social media interaction is beneficial to a campaign’s desired outcome. Users could well be sharing or commenting on a candidate’s post in order to criticise him or her. This seems obvious but often only in hindsight.
Late Surge
By the time official campaigning ended on August 30, Mr Tharman garnered more interactions for his 137 FB posts than the combined 377 posts by his two rivals, as the chart below shows.
The most striking overall trend is the strong late surge on FB by the Tharman campaign. On August 30, Mr Tharman’s FB posts garnered 14,311 total interactions, his campaign’s strongest one-day performance. This figure was more than twice that for Mr Tan (6,385), and more than six times that for Mr Ng (2,329) on the same day.
A surge in polling approval in the final days of campaigning is typically a sign of success in US elections. Such polls aren’t allowed in Singapore, so one could argue that FB data in this case pointed in the right direction in terms of the main outcome — that of a clear victory in the works for Mr Tharman.
But the FB data was wrong in two areas — it underestimated Mr Tharman’s performance at the polls, and gave a false impression of Mr Tan’s popularity.
According to official results, Mr Tharman won 70.4% of valid votes, while Mr Ng and Mr Tan won 15.72 and 13.88% respectively. But if one had taken FB data at face value, Mr Tharman was merely on track to win with a margin of 54% (his share of total FB interaction among all 3 candidates between August 11–30).
More interestingly, FB data inflated Mr Tan’s performance quite substantially. Again, if you take the FB data at face value, Mr Tan was expected to take in around 35.8% of the votes versus 10.2% for Mg Ng.
This flew in the face of the multiple controversies Mr Tan found himself in during the election, and confirms yet again that not all interaction on social media is a good thing for a campaign. Astute campaign managers need to be able to tell the difference and adjust their tactics accordingly.
Close-up On Tharman’s FB Performance: All In On Reels
Between August 11–30, Mr Tharman’s campaign posted 87 Reels short-form videos, 23 links, 20 FB native videos, and 7 photos on the candidate’s FB page. As the chart below shows, the Reels videos accounted for the bulk of user interaction.
In fact, the Reels strategy was so successful for Mr Tharman that the total user interaction from this particular format alone — 74,547 — was greater than what his two rivals achieved from posting on FB across a range of different formats. Mr Tan’s 248 FB posts received 71,838 interactions, whereas Mr Ng’s 129 FB posts garnered 20,456 interactions.
Much of this comes down to Mr Tharman’s personal popularity. As we’ll see in the next chart, not all short-form videos are equally popular.
Close-up On Ng Kok Song’s FB Performance: Near-equal Split Between Reels and Photos
Mr Ng’s campaign team posted 60 Reels videos, 52 photos, 8 FB native videos, 6 YouTube videos and 3 links between August 11–30. His short-form videos, however, performed much more modestly compared to those on Mr Tharman’s FB page.
On average, Mr Tharman’s Reels got him 857 interactions per short-form video — about five times more than the 166 interactions that Mr Ng’s short-form videos got on average.
Mr Ng’s short-form videos weren’t just posted on FB, of course. They were cross-posted on IG as well as on TikTok, where he got very healthy viewership numbers.
Mr Ng’s performance on Tiktok and IG were in fact much stronger than what he managed on FB, where the strength of his campaign was likely under-estimated. This was borne out in the official vote count, where Mr Ng beat Mr Tan by nearly 46,000 votes.
Close-up Mr Tan Kin Lian’s FB Performance: A Mix Of Old School And Firehose Tactics
Mr Tan’s FB strategy is practically the mirror-opposite of Mr Tharman’s. Whereas Mr Tharman’s campaign focused heavily on short-form videos on FB, Mr Tan eschewed that format in favor of old-school text-only status updates and links. He also appears to have a penchant for live videos on FB, a format that has largely fallen out of favor.
Between August 11–30, he posted 77 status updates, 55 links, 53 photos, 22 YouTube videos, 17 FB native videos, 16 FB Live videos, and only 8 Reels videos on his FB page. He posted nearly twice as much on FB as Mr Tharman, but did not get the same level of returns in terms of user interaction.
The breakdown of Mr Tan’s FB content during the election period looks more like what a political candidate might have done 10 years ago, with the over-reliance on photos and status updates to drive interactions.
But would a different FB strategy have made a difference in the electoral outcome for Mr Tan? Or were the results “baked in” as a result of his rhetoric and conduct during the campaign?
Final Thoughts
Elections in Singapore are mostly contested at the local level by rival political parties. The 2023 Presidential Election hence offered an interesting opportunity to examine how three candidates competed directly against each other at the national level, and at a time of growing fragmentation in the social media landscape.
The lessons gleaned from their performance on FB may not apply in the same way at the next General Election, but these are the key takeaways in my view:
- Focus on the format, not the platform: It’s a fool’s errand to try and pick which social media platform to focus on, as users are fickle and platform agnostic. Politicians are better off focusing their efforts on crafting content in the most popular format and spreading them across as many platforms as possible. Short-form videos are not just popular with users but with platform owners as well as they are trying to copy or catch up with TikTok’s success. The easiest path to social media success is to ride this dominant wave instead of trying to paddle against it.
- Singaporeans like their politicians squeaky clean and no-nonsense: Social media users in Singapore will flock to an online controversy like users anywhere else in the world. But the final voting outcome in the Presidential Election makes it quite clear that the electorate prefers their politicians to be the no-nonsense type. They have no appetite for Trump-like controversies or campaign tactics. Attempts to copy Mr Tan’s campaign tactics likely won’t end well for future political hopefuls.
- Don’t be blindsided by social media data: This seems obvious, but only in hindsight. At the height of the Presidential Election, Mr Tan’s strong performance on social media prompted many to speculate that he would get a higher-than-expected vote share. The opposite was true. Did social media metrics blind Mr Tan to the true state of his campaign? Perhaps. There is no surefire way to tell if social media interaction will lead to the actual outcomes you want. Social media data is helpful in the absence of regular polling, but it could just as well blind you to the glaring pitfalls.
