Eureka! Institutional Repository

Web campaigning has been an established political marketing approach used by politicians and parties in various electoral contests. The emergence of web 2.0 tools and social media offer new challenging promotional tools for politicians. The aim of the present study is to explore the use of social media by candidates for the municipality seats of the 2010 local elections. Specifically, this study investigates a) the preferences of candidates in using a mixture of various social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as using a website for their electoral campaign b) the urbanization factor in the use of web tools in the 2010 municipal electoral campaign (c) the influence of web campaign in the outcome results of the local municipal elections. The analysis is based on a sample of 1284 candidates who ran in the 2010 Greek local elections for the municipality seats. Our results demonstrate that a) the urbanization factor is influencing candidates to run a social media electoral campaign and b) Facebook was the leading web campaign tool in the 2010 municipal elections in Greece due to its widespread use by candidates as well as its effectiveness in the outcome of the electoral result.