Posting or Advertising? How Political Parties Adapt Their Messaging Strategies to Facebook's Organic and Paid Media Affordances

Facebook plays a key role in election campaigns because it provides strategic marketing affordances for political parties' electoral goals. Organic media allow to engage regularly with broader audiences through publicly visible Facebook posts. Paid media advertisements draw on personal data to target tailored messages only at selected users. Thus, political parties can misuse them to highlight contradictory issues or drive negative narratives to susceptible voters. However, studies are lacking about how and to what extent parties adapt the use and content of their messaging strategies to Facebook's organic and paid media affordances. To provide answers to these questions, this study draws on data from a manual content analysis to compare the timing and content strategies of all posts, sponsored post, and ads which were distributed by six parties in a four-week time span before the 2018 German state election in Hesse. Our results add to the political marketing literature by showing that parties use organic and paid media as independent messaging strategies. Both are published at rather different times in the campaign and with different campaign functions, issues, and degrees of negativity. Further, we show that parties' organic and paid messaging strategies are dependent on party characteristics and electoral competition.