Labour have rolled out their latest election policy. The banning of cosmetics tested on animals. As is to be expected with a topic like this, Labour have gone down the route of cute and cuddly animals in the graphics.
Cute animals should always get attention on social media. This is the case on the Facebook post. As at the time this is written, it has 139 shares on Facebook in around 2 hours time. This compares with 11 retweets on Twitter in the same period. This is influenced by the different ways that Facebook and Twitter work. Facebook has the habit of serving the same post, to different people, at different times, based on who is interacting with it. Where as Twitter serves the post in your feed once, unless it then gets actively retweeted.
Labour have done something that not many other parties have done. They have produced two graphics for the same policy announcement. I suspect we will see this happening a bit more, as the election campaign ramps up.
I am a bit surprised that they have gone with two images of puppies thought. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them use a picture of a rabbit. Though I am not surprised they have gone down the cute route. They could have taken the shock route and gone with images of tortured animals. But that wouldn’t stick with their Vote Positive campaign slogan.
However, I suspect that this is the sort of policy area where, pretty much no matter what you put on the graphic, it would get spread around. However both Tweets, and the Facebook post, lack mention of either of Labours campaign hashtags. However this won’t put a massive dent in the spreading of the message, and this policy announcement will still play a greater role in generating attention, and media impressions on other policy areas, thus helping spread the wider Labour message.
