Marketing Communications in Election Campaigns

Abstract

The article discusses the peculiarities of building political communications based on the material of official Twitter accounts of Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky as candidates for the President of Ukraine from 31.03 to 21.04.2019. Today's politicians are actively leveraging the positive experience of using Internet technologies to influence target audiences and building political communication with potential voters. Therefore, political communications including posts on candidates' official pages between the first and second rounds of presidential elections were chosen for the analysis. Based on the content analysis of text messages in the following aspects: frequency of posting, thematic integrity and completeness of the content, use of keywords, the participation in debates, vision of Ukraine's geopolitical strategy, and V. Zelensky's inaugural speech, the authors concluded that V. Zelensky's account was inferior to P. Poroshenko's account by the number of subscribers (readers) – 34 thousand vs 1.21 million; messages (43 vs 270); meaningful keywords. Significant differences were observed in the thematic content filling. V. Zelensky used completely different instruments considering the mood of the citizens of Ukraine, their attitude to the previous government. He played on the heartstrings of Ukrainians. His phenomenon is similar to the phenomenon in the interpretation of I. Kant, it is based primarily on feelings.