What a Giraffe Photo Says about Kenya’s 2017 Election
Less than three weeks remain until Kenya stages another presidential election on October 26. This comes after the August 8 presidential race was annulled in an unprecedented move by Kenya’s Supreme Court. The reelection has prompted a flurry of activity by the two political parties and both are using political bloggers to campaign on social media. We previously examined the online battle for influence during Kenya’s 2017 election and this piece looks specifically at how political bloggers have used imagery in their posts.
Every social media user should know by now that embedding visual content in posts results in higher view counts and better engagement on all social media platforms. However, we were interested to investigate what kind of images users responded to the most during Kenya’s election.
August 8 Election
First, we looked at the campaign period for the August 8 election for which we analyzed our dataset of 2.3 million social media posts collected between May and August. We then filtered the posts to identify the top 100 most engaged ones that contained an image. Engagement in this context is defined as a post that elicits a reaction, comment, or is shared by a user. Users clearly engaged the most on Facebook, with only four posts in the Top 100 originating from Instagram.
Surprisingly, an Instagram post made by National Geographic had the highest engagement score even though the image did not depict the election proceedings. Instead, the accompanying text wished Kenya peace after the election. The post got 619,698 likes and 1,779 comments.
Religious messages and images also seemed to get a lot of engagement from users, such as a post from the public Facebook page of the Divine Mercy Chapel. It ranked 14th on the engagement score and there were other posts by religious organizations within the Top 100. Nevertheless, we believe that in the case of religious posts it was the lengthy message that resonated more than the photo.
Political candidates and their respective parties also posted prolifically on Facebook and these images mainly depicted campaign events or highlights.
October 26 Election
Second, we analyzed imagery following the now annulled August presidential election. For this we turned our attention to what 37 party-affiliated bloggers posted on their Twitter feeds.
The Jubilee affiliated bloggers had most engagement with posts that dealt with the presidential election that was annulled on September 1. Photos of rallies and screenshots of newspapers, TV and documents prevail, although a few bloggers attempted to engage users with humor. Tweets with the images below had engagements of 498, 867 and 433 (from left to right).
When examining the top engaged tweets by NASA affiliated bloggers, it is evident that they focused more on the theme of violence. They used several images criticizing the Kenyan security forces and a photomontage attacking the IEBC’s CEO, Ezra Chiloba.The latter had 1,111 engagements while the left image had 1,415 and the right one 1,032.
Final Thoughts
Research shows that tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than those without images. The same is true for Facebook where posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than those without images. Even higher engagement figures are possible when posting video content. This dynamic is clearly understood by the social media users analyzed in this short study though they mostly fall short of compelling visual story telling.
For the first part of this study, we often saw high quality photos taken by photojournalists and the images conveyed a strong story that engaged social media users. Conversely, we also saw photos used almost as an afterthought on lengthy Facebook posts. These photos added little to the overall message or story. Images found in the second part of the study were typically of lower quality and they had noticeably less engagement. They followed a party agenda and there were distinct differences in what Jubilee and NASA affiliated bloggers tried to convey through images.
But let’s not forget that the post generating the highest impressions and the most engagement featured a cute giraffe fed by what looks to be a Maasai. This emotive black and white photo clearly resonated with users and was thus the perfect medium to convey a message of peace.
