Campanha eleitoral no Facebook: usos, configurações e o papel atribuído a este site pelos candidatos durante as eleições municipais de 2012

Since 2004 Social Networking Sites (SNS’s) have been used by candidates and parties as an essential part of online communication strategies. With Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube ranking as the most popular SNS’s among political campaigns along this period, political communication researchers have been paying more attention to the political dimension of these online channels. Notwithstanding, there are deep gaps in online campaign literature concerning the Facebook usage as campaign instrument by parties and candidates despite its popularity among internet users. In this paper we intend to contribute in filling this literature gap by quantifying how extensive was the presence of three mayoral candidates from three different Brazilian state capitals: São Paulo, Salvador and Manaus. Thus, we present how the three candidates performed on Facebook considering two fundamental aspects: (a) how the campaigns adapted their contents to the users’ communication codes and (b) in which ways Facebook campaign contents were linked to contents from others campaigns’ official profiles on Social Networking Sites such as YouTube. Based on our analysis we demonstrate that Facebook played a central and integrating role in the three campaigns analyzed