Advances in Social Media and Political Campaigns in Elections: An Assessment of the 2016 General Elections in Ghana

Abstract

Initially meant for social networking and interacting with acquaintances, the new media in the form of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are now becoming crucial instruments in political communication. This is because social media has proven to be an effective format for political communication given its several features like photo sharing, status update, tags, post sharing, likes, live videos, video sharing amongst others. Furthermore, social media has democratised media access, and has afforded people who have previously been side-lined by traditional media an important platform for political mobilization. Most importantly, it has generated interest in politics among young people. The intersection between traditional media and other social media has augmented their efficiency by amplifying their reach. The study is an explorative one that adopted purposive sampling to select participants from the New Patriotic Party (NPP), National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the Progressive People’s Party (PPP). The findings revealed that although presidential candidates integrated social media into their campaign they are yet to exploit its full potential. However, social media by itself could not guarantee a candidate victory in the elections. Therefore, presidential candidates need to strike a balance between their campaigns on social media with the ground campaigns to ensure that they reach most of the electorate.