Image and cover title as strategic elements of political communication on YouTube: use by the Spanish political sphere

Abstract

Political parties have a growing presence on social media. However, the communication strategies in these are different from those developed in conventional media. The digital environment multiplies the number of people involved in the construction of political information, which directly affects the image that, in this type of spaces, is projected from public representatives and their formations. The planned message by the political sphere competes in this scenario with countless prosumers that make it difficult to achieve the desired strategic efficiency. This research examines how Spanish political parties manage the peculiarities of production and broadcasting of content on YouTube through three elements: the channel from where the videos are published, the cover image that tops the contents and the titles that accompany it.

At the methodological level, a quantitative-qualitative perspective is adopted. Through content analysis are examined a hundred of the most reproduced videos in 2019 about the five Spanish political parties at the state level with the highest parliamentary representation. Among the results, we stand out the poor control of the political sphere in published contents, whose management is shared between the public spheres and mass media, almost equally. Apart from the lack of widespread intervention by political parties in the contents that are disseminated and consumed on YouTube, the data put Vox as the group that performs a more direct management over the indicators examined.