Giorgia Meloni, social networks become institutional: a breakthrough in communication

This Monday morning, the people who follow Giorgia Meloni’s social networks updated her profile picture and biography, from Twitter to Instagram, from Facebook to Telegram, which was still locked in the previous description, which is “Romano, class of 77, politician and journalist Always, everywhere and above all Italian President of the Brothers of Italy ».

Thus, all partisan and personal references disappeared and it was decided to choose the formula, decidedly more concise and exhaustive, of “President of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic”.

A mandatory step that also opens up a second, decidedly more interesting reflection, not so much about how the language, the graphic construction or the choice of topics that will be published daily on the various social channels will inevitably change, but how this new trajectory will affect the capacity of your posts to preserve the virality and audience we are used to. In other words, being able to capture, as has largely happened in the recent past, the attention of those 32 million Italians who, according to the latest We Are Social report, connect on average to social platforms for around two hours a day. In fact, there is no doubt that the social strategy adopted in recent years, combined with the political choices pursued, was one of the keys to the electoral triumph of the 25th of September.

However, as we have already seen from the consultations, although in fact something was changing its tone since the first days after the vote, the context and the institutional role led to a deep cleaning of the elements that characterized the messages and posts of Giorgia Meloni. The informal, sometimes aggressive, profoundly explicit and unconventional language, key to Meloni’s social communication identity, conformed to the new path that, on the contrary, demands no longer a biased narrative, but a story that knows how to speak credibly to all Italians and all Italians, as well as international actors, the press that watches us from all over the Alps, supranational institutions, business people and the working class, the world of culture and education.

A semantic and content mutation is already underway, which finds, just to bring the reader two concrete examples, factual evidence in the choice to publish directly in writing in English the congratulations to Rishi Sunak appointed Prime Minister of the United Kingdom yesterday, or, a few hours after accepting the task of forming the government from Sergio Mattarella, here she is always thanking Ukrainian President Zelensky in English for the latter’s congratulations. In the coming weeks and months we will understand the real reach, in terms of audience, of this mutation of content and language and, similarly, like Giorgia Meloni, she will want to bring together the social channels of Palazzo Chigi, used at full capacity by Mario Draghi who doesn’t have himself, with his. Meanwhile, waiting to draw conclusions, it must be said that among all the social posts published yesterday to comment on the prime minister’s direct speech to the Chamber of Deputies, the one that got the most reactions, by far, is still once again Meloni’s own post, which garnered more than 83,000 likes, more than 34,000 comments and around 10,000 shares on Facebook.