Meloni, Salvini and Berlusconi, Politicians Discovered TikTok Is Indispensable

When in the early days of November 2019, League Secretary Matteo Salvini officially landed on TikTok, many, if not almost all, inside and outside the Political Palace, commented on this choice with a good deal of smiles and lifts from behind. Mistrust and skepticism, partially understandable, were the unbridled reactions. A few weeks later, it was Giorgia Meloni who opened an account on the platform, which at the time everyone thought was just a digital refuge for teenagers with pimples, but which was already starting to grow faster than all the others, so much so that today more than 67% of subscribers is over 25 years old. In fact, if we want to be precise, Meloni’s debut on TikTok, which is and remains a content platform and not a social network in the strict sense, was already there before Salvini too, regardless of the will of the same Fratelli leader. from Italy, thanks to the remix of the catchphrase «Io sono Giorgia» released by «Mem & J» and used by tiktokers as a soundtrack to the videos they posted. Because, for the basic algorithm that governs Chinese social networks, the musical component is fundamental to guarantee the virality of the content. After all, as TikTok’s insights show, videos labeled “I am Giorgia” had over 238 million views.

Then, over the next three years, behind the two pioneers Salvini and Meloni, there were many other politicians who opened their TikTok account, mostly quietly, quietly and quietly. A deliberate silence, so as not to compromise with the inconsistency that until that day had made him publicly despise the use of the platform. So here the line of politicians gets longer and after Giuseppe Conte, Gianluigi Paragone, Alessandro Di Battista and even Vincenzo De Luca, the day before yesterday, it was also Carlo Calenda’s turn. But the Action leader in the opening video immediately gets involved in the aforementioned prejudice: «One, I can’t dance, I look like a drunk bear, two, I can’t give makeup advice because I have a belly and I’m ugly. But I can talk to you about politics, books and culture». If I keep this exclusively subjective approach – of the series, it’s the platform ecosystem that has to adapt to me and not vice versa – it’s unlikely that Calenda will be able to exploit the capacity of TikTok, for which, incidentally, it was suggested to open its own account, make content go viral and make it more popular than all other social networks. Incidentally, unlike Instagram or Facebook, in the social network launched in China in 2014 by Bytedance and landed in Europe just five years ago, video content has incomparable percentages of interaction and engagement and totally unrelated to the number of followers. individual accounts. Last in order of arrival is Berlusconi who will be on TikTok starting today. Just yesterday, in addition, TikTok Italia published the policy to ensure electoral integrity on its platform where, in addition, the publication of paid political-electoral content was already prohibited. The main objective – as the site states – is “to guarantee access to reliable information, so today we have activated an Electoral Center to help those who interact with content on the subject to resort to reliable sources and information”. The proof that TikTok has become for politicians today, at least for leaders looking for growing audience shares in view of the September 25 election deadline, an indispensable destination, is given by a few simple numbers. Just look, for example, at the engagement and interaction rate of the content of the last 28 days of the profiles of political leaders to see how here a video can easily generate an engagement that exceeds 25%, when the average of the other platforms is struggling to reach the 5% or the interaction with the post even reaches – in the case of Conte – 72% against an average value of 3% in the same period. Not to mention the views, which give us back the measure of garnishing the info-sphere of social media by politicians, with the hashtag #giorgiameloni that got more than 200 million views, while the hashtag #matteosalvini collected another 92 million.