Last night the opening addresses for political parties were broadcast on TVNZ. I am on the road in Auckland and have only been able to see the Internet Mana Party one. I will leave other people to dissect the broadcasts themselves. But I do want to comment on the link up between the opening broadcasts and the various party’s social media accounts.
Each party produces its own ad, so each party should have a copy it is able to post online as the ad is going to air on TV. This is even more important this year because the opening broadcasts were scheduled to go to air at the same time as the All Blacks vs Australia test at Eden Park. So if parties are wanting to maximise the number of people who are going to see the opening broadcasts, they will need to start pushing them on social media quickly. So how have they done?
I checked the Facebook pages of the parties and their Twitter accounts around 9-10pm last night.
National:
Nothing, on either their Facebook or Twitter accounts.
Update: National have posted their video on Facebook this morning, around 9am.
Labour:
On Twitter they not only tweeted the link to the video.
They also told their followers that they would tweet a link at half time:
Which they then did:
Greens:
The Greens haven’t posted it on Facebook, but they did give their followers on Twitter a warning that it was about to come on:
Followed by tweeting the link:
United Future:
No link on Twitter or Facebook.
Act Party:
Act tweeted around 2pm that the broadcasts were coming up, but that was it.
Internet Mana Party:
The Internet Party element of the Internet Mana Party have been pushing the opening address:
However the Mana element has not been as effective:
It looks like some parties are well organised and prepared to pushing their opening addresses on social media. There are a number of ways that you can upload videos to either Youtube or Facebook so that they are only visible when you want them to be. So it is not like those behind the parties need to wait for the video to be broadcast before they can start to upload it. The parties that have not posted links are most likely going to be missing out on a number of views. I have seen a number of comments on social media about various aspects of different opening addresses. I am sure others have seen them and would have felt the need to go and have a look, but some of the parties haven’t made them available. As outlined, it is not hard to organise, so why have some parties not done it?
