Tiktoker candidates: Podemos and Vox, the ones that best move in the youth network

While the parties riot in the Central Electoral Board to scratch a few minutes of promotion on RTVE, the real battle for space, politics and communication for young people is on social networks.

It is a maxim that the first Podemos already established with force with Twitter and Facebook, and that it continues to replicate today with TikTok, the network in which it continues to dominate the rest of the formations (445,000 followers) followed by Vox (136,000).

The latest BCW Spain report on TikTok, entitled From dances to vote mobilization, deduces that the social network is no longer simply an entertainment forum but an “opinion mobilizer”, without renouncing the former.. Of course, he clarifies that to stand out in the younger network it is necessary to “speak their language and handle their algorithm”, something that is not available to everyone.

According to data from the social network audience consultancy Start.io, only one in three TikTok users in Spain is over 25 years old, making the social network a perfect breeding ground for the young vote.. In part, perhaps this explains the disaffection of Generation Z with bipartisanship, although there does not seem to be much interest on the part of the PP and PSOE in getting closer to them, at least in the codes of social networks.

The old parties cannot find their place. Neither the profiles of the candidates, nor the regional ones, nor the official party accounts compete in the slightest with Podemos and Vox in national terms (the PP has 36,000 followers and the PSOE does not reach 5,500) nor with the regional ones in their respective territories. To give an example, the Barcelona en Comú account has almost 10 times more followers than that of the socialists.

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In fact, even this dynamic is explained through the videos of the matches. It is no coincidence that the most viewed video on the Podemos account —by a wide margin, the most followed party— is precisely one in which Lucía Muñoz, its youngest deputy, lashes out at the PSOE during the reform debate of the law of only yes is yes. It is about the controversial intervention in which he called the socialist deputies a “handful of fascists”.

On the other hand, “parties like Compromís, Más Madrid or Barcelona en Comú have a strong, cunning and imposing presence within the social network. In general, they develop strategies similar to those of their candidates, although they always give them that personal touch necessary to connect,” explains the BCW report.. “In any case, maintaining profiles does not imply achieving an impact if they are not worked well, the tiktoker language is spoken or the algorithm is mastered.”

The strategies

On this point, the communication agency highlights the strategies of some of the municipal and regional candidates who are at stake on May 28. In Madrid, they emphasize how Mónica García (Más Madrid) or Alejandra Jacinto (Unidas Podemos), who accumulate millions of views, use “very gen-z language” or trending music to address their audiences.

The great absence, they also comment, is that of Rocío Monasterio or Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who do not have their own account but appear in many videos. His tandem in the Madrid City Council, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, who shares “potentially viral” videos and does not limit himself “to following trends [trends], but aims to create them, sometimes by caricaturing himself using humor.”

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