Can Facebook help you become mayor? Case study: Bacãu, 2016

Abstract

Cleverly used in political communication, Facebook helps candidates to raise their visibility, to directly communicate with the citizens and involve them in creating virtual communities and content in order to virally promote political messages.
In our study we briefly present the way in which Facebook was used, timidly at first, in the election campaign of Bacau from 2012 and 2016.
The importance of the social media during the local elections in this city has slowly but surly increased. In 2012, the presence on Facebook was only an oportunity, much less exploited than television or newspapers. In 2016 all the candidates created their campaign online, some of them exclusively on this social network. However, the success of the 2.0 mayor is not based only on using the social network as (an alternative) news channel, but rather on establishing a bidirectional link and a constant interaction with virtual friends.