UP CLOSE AND PROFESSIONAL : A Case Study of Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's Communication on Social Media

Sammanfattning: It did not take too long before the politicians found the social media sites Twitter and Facebook as good ways to connect to the people and spread their politics. However, due to the somewhat personal origin of these sites, how much of their personal lives do they include within their political reasons for being there? How do they balance the combination of presenting their political and professional self and the personal self? That is what this thesis aim to find out. This is not the first research about political communication on social media, but most of the research in this field has focused on the social media communication during an election. This research however, aims to expand this knowledge by gathering material from a non-election period in order to investigate the day-to-day political communication on social media. Due to the length and structure of this thesis I limit my aim and topic to investigating one politicians social media use and thereby making it a case study. Using an interpretive coding with a grounded approach method I investigated Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s communication on Twitter and Facebook during the year 2012. By applying theories about visibility, the presentation of the self, image creation and political communication, the aim is to understand how Stoltenberg use these social media sites. The focus will be on the content of the communication, the mentioned balance between the professional politician and the personal person, and lastly what of these that create the most engagement from the followers in terms of “likes” and retweets. I find and argue that the balance between the Twitter and Facebook content is relatively even, consisting mostly of professional and informational content, while the balance between the professional Stoltenberg and the personal Jens is uneven in favour for the professional. However, due to Stoltenberg’s popular appeal and “folkelig” image, the person Jens Stoltenberg becomes visible on the sites as well.