The looks and likes of a political winner: do social media engagement and electoral success go together?

We use Facebook page ‘likes’ in political elections to examine whether social media engagement can predict political candidates’ campaign success. We find that for every one percentage point increase in the electoral district share of Facebook likes that a candidate receives, their vote share is predicted to increase by 0.09 percentage points. The positive estimated effect of social media engagement on vote share is robust to the potential confounding influence of unobserved factors. Facebook like data correctly predicts the outcome in just under two-thirds of seats, while two competing predictors of electoral success established in the prior literature–candidates’ attractiveness and competence ratings–only predict slightly more than 50 per cent of seats. The findings suggest that social media users’ engagement can be used to help inform election outcomes.