Title: Social media as a political marketing platform

Reason for choosing the topic

The reason for selecting such topic is because with the increase in popularity and
growth in the use of social media, democracies are wondering if social media can
be valid indicator to predict elections outcome in Barangay Poblacion. With this,
we can extend the knowledge about social media use in politics and its impact on
the political engagement of the voter in Barangay Poblacion. Also, we choose this
to analyze and contribute to original and current knowledge and findings on the use
of social media in political campaigning in the Barangay Poblacion and provide a
document to educate the world about changing trends in African politics and guide
for other countries and persons with political ambition.

Introduction
A. Background of the study
Political marketing can be defined as “the application of marketing principles and
procedures in political campaigns by various individuals and organizations. The
procedures involved include the analysis, development, execution, and
management of strategic campaigns by candidates, political parties, governments,
lobbyists and interest groups that seek to drive public opinion, advance their own
ideologies, win elections, and pass legislation and referenda in response to the
needs and wants of selected people and groups in a society” (Newman, 1999, p.
xiii). The concept "political marketing" alludes to the efforts undertaken by
political parties in order to influence voters and is aimed at persuading citizens to
support political candidates in order to garner the greatest number of votes. The
power of social media is one of the marketing tools used by political parties to
attract voters. Politics and the social media have always worked closely. Social
media allows political marketers to build a political marketplace where
politicians may utilize social media to influence public opinion. It has evolved into
a powerful instrument for expressing one's thoughts, opinions, and ideas, as well as
an influential tool for opinion formation. In the latter part of the twentieth century,
commercial marketing concepts and theoretical frameworks have been applied to
politics with growing sophistication. (Henneberg, 2004) There is a common
consensus that political marketing has notable importance in politics/is extremely
important for politics: elections, referenda, governing, lobbying, public services
management, etc., they all represent the marketing triumph of an approach that first
originated in business and then transformed the nature of modern politics
(Newman, 1999). The previous studies claimed that posts to parties and to
candidates showed a systematic relationship with subsequent votes on the day of
the election (Effing et al., 2011; Jungherr, 2013; Tumasjan et al., 2010a, 2010b). .
Political campaigns have undergone such a radical transformation that those
principles and practices accepted by practitioners and theorists even 15 years ago
are largely irrelevant today (Trent and Friedenberg, 2000, p4). The research
intends to study the Impact of Harnessing social media for political campaigns in
Barangay Poblacion and How the use of social media has changed the trajectory of
political campaign communication in Barangay Poblacion. This will specifically
focus on political parties in the Barangay Poblacion concentrating on the 2012,
2016, and 2020 general elections.

B. Statement of the Problem

The problem of the study focused on determining the following:
 The main problem of this study focused on extending the knowledge about
social media use in politics.
 Impact of Harnessing social media for political campaigns in Barangay
Poblacion .
 How the use of social media has changed the trajectory of political campaign
communication in Barangay Poblacion.
 The online political activities and their impact on the political engagement of
the voters in Barangay Poblacion.

C. Scope and Limitation

The purpose of the literature review was to examine a wide range of sources
relevant to this study and draw conclusions based on the findings. With the
intention of doing inclusive study, the researcher made some scopes. This scopes
include: (1) The use of social media is cost-effective for political campaigns. (2)
Social media allows political marketers to build a political marketplace where
politicians may utilize social media to influence public opinion. (3) Social media
campaigns should be used in an efficient way through reaching volunteers and
increasing their shares on the platforms for the multiplier effect. (4) The campaigns
that created by political candidates and parties are easily accessible to the target
audience through social media platforms, thus, marketing activities can be
managed with voters reviews in a more interactive way.

Although the results are very applicable in practice, there are some weaknesses and
limitations of this research, such as the number of respondents considered is rather
small compared to the total active social media users and voters. Thus, the study
only investigates Barangay Poblacion voters, hence, the findings and conclusions
drawn from the research are the representation of the Barangay Poblacion voters
and findings may not generalize to other geographic regions or culture.

D. Sources
DiGrazia, J., McKelvey, K., Bollen, J., & Rojas, F. (2013). More tweets, more votes: Social
media as a quantitative indicator of political behavior. PloS One, 8(11), e79449.
McKelvey, K., DiGrazia, J., & Rojas, F. (2014). Twitter publics: How online political
communities signaled electoral outcomes in the 2010 US house election. Information
Communication & Society, 17(4), 436e450.
Wani, G., & Alone, N. (2014). A survey on impact of social media on election system.
International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technologies, 5(6).
Bagić Babac, M. & Podobnik, V. (2018). What social media activities reveal about election
results? The use of Facebook during the 2015 general election campaign in Croatia. Information
Technology & People, 31(2), 327-347. https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-08-2016-0200.
Henneberg, S. C. (2002). The Idea of Political Marketing. London: Praeger
Henneberg, S.C. (2004). The views of an advocatus dei: Political marketing and its critics.
Journal of Public Affairs, 4(3), 225–243.
Newman, 1999
B.I. Newman

Handbook of political marketing Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA (1999) Google Scholar