Political

Why do Members of Parliament use Facebook?

When it comes to social media, Facebook is pretty much it as far as MPs go. For example, of the Liberal Democrat Shadow Cabinet members, 100% have a public email address, 90% have a website (the exceptions being in the House of Lords), 72% are on Facebook, 7% blog (and for another 7% there are party blogs covering their portfolio, even though they do not blog personally), and 3% are on Twitter. None have an active MySpace or Bebo presence (though there’s one that is now defunct).

Similar patterns – heavy email use, slightly lighter website coverage, many Facebook profiles, fewer bloggers and Twitter bringing up the rear – occur across all the main political parties.

This is not just a matter of new services taking time to catch on; blogging, after all, has been around for much longer than Facebook and the first politicians on Facebook came years after the first blogging politicians.

So what is it about Facebook that makes it attractive to MPs?

Facebook has a large audience

Hitwise’s figures from earlier this year give Facebook 45% of the UK traffic to social networking sites, and growing. This leaves even its largest competitor – Bebo – trailing far behind (with 25% of the traffic).

If you are an MP, you want to go to where your audience is, just as you’d be more likely to arrange a constituency surgery or a public meeting in an area most of your constituents can get to than in the furthest flung corner of your constituency.

Facebook has an audience who can vote

Bebo’s real strength is with young teenagers, many of whom are too young to vote. Facebook though has its origins in the student (old enough to vote) audience and, since being opened up to a wider audience, has established itself amongst older people too. Although there are niche social networking sites for other age ranges – such as Saga Zone – they have not built up anything like the audience of Facebook.

Facebook’s requirements that people are really human, are who they say they are and are at least 13 years old, are impossible to enforce 100%, but Facebook does put in significant efforts and – anyway – the culture of the site is that people are generally who they say they are, with much of its functionality depending on this.

This culture, which is very different from some other social networking services, is perhaps more important than the nominal rules, but combined they bring MPs the benefit that they are largely interacting with people who can cast a vote in the real world.

Facebook is a one-to-many service

Typically an MP will have an electorate of 80,000 or so (let alone the wider audiences they may be interested in, such as a health spokesperson being interested in people who work in the NHS across the country).

Assuming an MP works every day of the year, only getting a one-day holiday in leap years, this means that they want to engage with each electors just once a year, they need to deal with 220 of them each day. Give them 8 hours off for sleep, eating and washing and you have to get through 14 an hour – or just over four minutes each. And no time for anything else, like speaking or voting in Parliament.

Facebook’s big attraction in this regard is that it allows an MP to make direct connections with people without having to individual engage with them one at a time.

Update your status, and hundreds or thousands of friends can see it. That’s a much easier and quicker form of bulk messaging than many other technologies offer – but provides for the recipient, when done well, a sense of direct information and personality that brings many benefits beyond the pure dry factual exchange of information.

Facebook requires relatively little content

Following on from the issue about time, one of Facebook’s other advantages is that it can be used effectively with relatively little investment of time.

It’s a great way of reusing other content (e.g. reusing photos that are also appearing in leaflets and with news releases); it can integrate with many other services (e.g. automatic importing of stories as notes); and much of the content produced on Facebook itself is only a couple of sentences long – or less.

All this means it can be used successfully with less of an investment of time than, for example, blogging – where to be successful more content more regularly is (almost always) needed.

The ‘me too’ factor

MPs are no different from the rest of us in that very few sit down and methodically analyse all the possible social media services they could use.

Instead, they rely far more on personal recommendation and seeing what their peers are using. Facebook therefore has a strong, self-reinforcing grip on the MP market – MPs use Facebook because they see other MPs using Facebook, and so they use Facebook, so more MP see other MPs using Facebook…

In my experience of talking to MPs about the internet, many of them feel (rightly) that the internet should be a key tool for them and know that having a website and using email is only scratching the surface of possibilities. Facebook therefore becomes the obvious (and safe – because they know lots of other MPs use it too) extra step to take.

It isn’t impossible for other services to break that grip – and I think Twitter’s ability to match many of Facebook’s benefits, whilst also being easy to integrate with Facebook’s status updates, means it is one to watch – it isn’t easy either.

There is also a lesson in all this for internet enthusiasts who wish to persuade more politicians to use the internet, and to use it better. Very few of the pitches, moans or exhortations I see aimed at MPs address the sort of points listed above, and if you’re not addressing the key factors behind MPs’ decisions, then you’re very unlikely to persuade them.

UPDATE: Traffic to Facebook this Christmas was at record levels and Facebook was the second most visited website after Google according to the Hitwise figures.

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