LONDON �� Luke Poults had never voted before. Yet before last week's U.K. general election, the 29-year old sports coach was increasingly politically active on social media.
He spent time watching pro-Labour Party videos shared by friends on topics such as health and education, and then re-shared these videos "to get people like me informed."
"Social media for me played a huge part in this year's election and my decision on who to vote for," Poults said, who ended up supporting Labour.
The governing Conservative Party's weaker-than-expected performance, and Labour's gains, could be partly explained by the savvy use of social media among Labour supporters that helped drive young, first-time voters like Poults to the polls.
After the election was called, Labour and the Liberal Democrats party sent post after post on Facebook and Twitter, encouraging young voters to register via social media, often providing direct links to the relevant pages.
Under 25s were by far the biggest group to register to vote, with more than 1 million signing up between April 18 _ when Prime Minister Theresa May set the election _ and the May 22 deadline, according to data from the U.K. government.
"Not only does this get people into the electorate, it also tells people that you want them," said Sam Jeffers, a co-founder of Who Targets Me, which looks at how political parties use Facebook for targeted advertising.
New registration figures are naturally skewed toward under 25s. People tend to register when young. But people between 25 and 34 _ who have had at least seven years already to register _ were only marginally the second-highest group of new registrants, with 973,000 signing up.
The Conservatives rehired digital experts Craig Elder and Tom Edmonds, who were in charge of digital strategy and branding during the party's 2015 campaign, while Labour aligned itself to social media influencers, such as musicians Stormzy and Jme, who have a combined Twitter following of about 1.5 million.
As the election deadline drew closer, Labour's efforts in dominating social media became increasingly obvious. From June 1 to June 7, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn added over 90,000 followers on Twitter, compared with just 20,000 in May, according to data from media analytics firm Social Bakers.
Over the seven days to June 9, the Conservative Facebook home page had 438,544 interactions. In comparison, the Labour page had 1.1 million, according to figures from Crowdtangle, a social monitoring platform owned by Facebook.
In short, Labour tweeted more, posted more, and was shared more than all of its rivals.
"These are huge numbers," said Darren Lilleker, a professor at Bournemouth University, regarding Labour's online reach. "I don't think the other parties really understood the importance of social media."
It also seems posting your political intentions online correlates to your voting tendencies.
In a 2012 study published in Nature, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Facebook analyzed messages sent to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 U.S. congressional midterm elections. The study found that exposure to social media messages encouraging voting had a strong effect in motivating people to go to the polls. The researchers estimated that the messages helped get 340,000 additional people to vote.
Lilleker, who has studied social media's impact on U.K. elections, said that Labour, unlike the Conservatives, experimented with a variety of different messages and understood the importance of dynamic photos and videos for making messages more shareable.
In addition to messages from the Labour Party itself, Lilleker cited get-out-the-vote messages produced by the left-wing Labour-affiliated group Momentum, which has championed Corbyn's leadership of the party, as having likely boosted young voter turnout. He also said that a number of pro-Corbyn Facebook groups, such as those titled "We Trust and Support Jeremy Corbyn," which has tens of thousands of members, helped share pro-Labour messages.
Not everyone agrees that social media has an impact on voting. Rachel Gibson, a political science professor at the University of Manchester, who has studied social media's impact on election turnout, said that the link between viewing or sharing content that favors a certain campaign and then actually voting for that party is tenuous at best. "Most evidence is that reading social media itself does not cause people to vote," she said.
Gibson noted that in 2015, the Labour Party had a much bigger presence on Twitter and was tweeted about far more than the Conservatives, yet lost badly. And noted this year, despite a seemingly better run digital media campaign and beating expectations, Labour still lost.
