Is TikTok Really The Future Of Politics?

With the UK General election just behind us, there is absolutely no way you missed the Labour, Conservative, and Lib Dems TikTok strategy.

In a strange change of events this year, we saw the top four political parties not just choose TikTok as a way to win over young voters - but we saw them adopt memes into their campaign strategy.

As you can see from the above screenshot taken from the legitimate Labour Party TikTok, they’re not what you’d expect from a 100’s year old organisation “trying to be down with the kids”.

But did it work?

While it’s amazing to see more Gen-Z targeted content out in the world - I hope to god this is not the reason we won the election.

There’s no data to say that either parties TikTok strategy was instrumental in their success or destruction - I had originally planned to argue that this only improved awareness to the younger generation and inspired them to vote - but the turnouts on Election Day were actually at a historical low (see the graph below).

So instead I’ll argue that the odd approach to professional politics is realising that the younger voter no longer relies on mainstream media for their news consumption. In fact the way they encourage the media has completely evolved.

Instead of relying on BBC and ITV, more and more young people are turning to Philip DeFranco or Dylan Page for trustworthy news and opinions, despite neither being a reputable organisation.

Being honest, I think the meme approach to social media marketing - especially from Political parties that are dictating the countries future - just feels like something from the Hunger Games - the lack of proper understanding of the platform, or the young voters needs has lead to something tacky, gimmicky, and honestly dissolves trust in any party.

There are some videos on the Labour and conservative profiles that are more professional and informative, but they by no means make up the majority of the content that was shared during the campaign period.

TikTok has played a large part in the change in media consumption over the past few years, considering the rise of news reporters (originating on YouTube), and the documentation of Gaza and early days of the Russia and Ukraine war. But just like any business, you can’t follow the crowd for the sake of it on social media, you need to research, to understand your audience and their needs - making content to match.

Give it another five years, hopefully they’ll know how to handle SMM.