Impact of Promotional Activities on Social Networks on Election Results for the Mayor of Zagreb in 2021

Political communication and political marketing have fully embraced the potentials and power of digital social networks, such as Facebook. The rise of social networks has revolutionized political marketing, creating new opportunities and challenges for political contestants. Today, it would be hard to imagine a political campaign without the use of social networks, so it is not surprising that human and financial resources dedicated to political promotion on social networks are constantly increasing. The main objective of this paper was to research the impact and relationship of promotional activities on the Facebook social network on the election results of the mayor of Zagreb in the local election of 2021. Obtained results proved the undeniable existence of a statistically significant, strong positive linear relationship (correlation) between all types of user reactions on the social network and the number of votes. However, a strong correlation does not necessarily mean that one variable directly causes the other. They only indicate the presence of a relationship between the variables. The practical implication of this research is found in the possibility of laying the groundwork for a future, more refined and better-tested predictor model for forecasting voting results solely based on user reactions and engagement on social networks, rather than on conventional voter surveys. Such a model would be much more cost and time-efficient compared to the personal surveying methods.