Toning Your Communication: A quantitative study of different tones in political communication.

Sammanfattning: In today’s political landscape, social media is all the rage, with political parties using it as an important channel of communication. Despite this, there has been little research regarding how to best use social media in a political context, and also regarding the use of social media in general. The purpose of this thesis is to examine what tone of communication is optimal for social media, more specifically on blogs. Blogs were chosen because of being deemed the most important channel, and also because of being a well established channel of communication. To examine what tone elicited the most positive response, we compared a group of respondents that had read a blog with a personal tone to a group of respondents that had read a blog with an official tone. In addition to the main study, a side study investigating potential signal effects of being present on social media was also conducted. The results showed that the official tone elicited the most positive responses for almost all parameters measured. The results obtained were quite surprising, since they contradicted the information gathered in interviews, and also existing academic research. There were also clearly significant positive effects from being present on social media.