UK political parties ‘failed to learn lessons of Obama’ with online campaigns

New research from Tamar has indicated that the major UK parties have missed a unique opportunity to win support in the recent election campaign through online engagement.
The research highlights that the parties have all failed to learn from the success of Obama’s political campaign that won him the presidency, as well as raising half a billion dollars online.
The research indicated David Cameron could have achieved his goal of achieving an overall majority had he and the party engaged more comprehensively online like Obama. In the age of personalised information and social networking there are growing networks of influencers, and the decision by two of the main leaders not to use Twitter highlights that there is a lack of understanding about how people in the UK find and share information.
Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron decided against engaging personally via Twitter and their engagement through the social media platform was largely confined to impersonal party accounts.
Parties also appeared to take a late move to personally engage with their audiences on YouTube and Facebook, significant attention was generated however not translated into personal campaigns.
Nick Cleg of the Liberal Democrats party did succeed in establishing a personal tone through his own Twitter account, connecting with his followers in over 10 informative tweets per day in the run up to the election.
Neil Jackson, Search Strategy Director at Tamar comments:
We’ve been monitoring the political parties’ online campaigns since October and this latest research shows clearly which of the major parties has begun to grasp the huge potential for converting people but even this was too little, too late. It seems that the two other main parties have up to now held social media engagement at a distance. Like the commercial sector, all parties will need to grasp the huge opportunities offered by this engagement, knowing that they have lost control of their ‘brand’ but gained a direct route to open dialogue with the people they represent.