IPAM and FOXP2 analyze the performance of political candidates on social networks

In addition to the analyses, rankings and metrics that have emerged recently, there is another useful tool that allows us to analyze the performance of the various political parties on social networks. Luís Bettencourt Moniz, Coordinator of the Post-Graduate course in Data Science Applied to Marketing and lecturer in Political Marketing at IPAM, and João Andrade Costa, Co-founder and lecturer in Political Marketing, launched the FOXP2 platform, together with a group of professionals from the Data Science, Intelligence, Analytical Marketing and Information Systems areas, with the aim of modeling, measuring and analyzing public data in order to produce information that positively transforms the national reality.

In order to analyse the leaders and political parties with the best performance for the March 10 elections on social media, IPAM students, especially from the Political Marketing Postgraduate and Marketing Research, Intelligence and Analytics Postgraduate courses, have been carrying out analysis work on the indicators and proposals for optimizing performance. They develop metrics and indicators to measure and analyze the value of data and information in digital ecosystems and build models for measuring, analyzing and forecasting public data.

Candidates' digital footprint

This analysis is composed and weighted in 3 dimensions: followers, engagement and content production on the 4 main social networks (Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter and TikTok).

In general, and for all social networks, it can be seen that in terms of engagement rate, the most important metric, André Ventura, is the leader with the best performance 25.5%, followed by Luís Montenegro (19.9%), Pedro Nuno Santos (17.4%), Mariana Mortágua (11.8%), Rui Tavares (11.4%), Inês de Sousa Real (11.2%) and Rui Rocha with 2.6%.

However, when comparing the total number of followers of the party leaders with the inclusion of Tik Tok, André Ventura shoots into first place with over 1 million followers (1,020,376), far ahead of the second most followed, Rui Tavares, with 147,498 followers. Mariana Mortágua follows soon after with 136,374 followers and further down the list there is Pedro Nuno Santos with 66,409, Luís Montenegro with 50,098, Inês Sousa Real with 30,901 and in last place, Rui Rocha with just 28,434 followers.

However, when analyzing relative engagement, AD stands out with 262.58% against Chega, which is in second place with 56.74%. When it comes to absolute engagement, which looks at total interactions, Chega once again stands out with 435,970, a long way behind AD in second place with 141,961 and the CDU in last place with just 13,409. PCP leader Paulo Raimundo doesn't use social media nd for this reason is not mentioned in this analysis.

"With this platform, we're trying to help the Portuguese get a sense of how political candidates act on social media. Through social media performance indicators and metrics, for politics, this platform provides content analysis based on machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms. In politics, this functionality makes it possible to automatically obtain the axes of communication, the most used words, groupings of words, entities, among others. This makes it easier to get to know politicians and their messages better," says Luís Bettencourt Moniz.

In addition to the indicators for the legislative elections, foxp2.pt has been providing indicators for Portuguese political parties every month since 2019.