Social Media Savvy? The Use and Effectiveness of Political Parties’ Issue Strategies Across Platforms in the German Federal Election Campaign 2025

How does the ever-growing relevance of social media shape political campaigning? A vibrant public and academic debate addresses the role of social media in elections and democratic processes. Yet, despite a surge in research, we still know little about the extent to which political parties adjust established issue strategies to the priorities of different social media platforms’ audiences and how effective these are in generating user engagement. Drawing on theories of issue competition – issue ownership, riding-the-wave, and issue yield – we analyze parties’ social media communication during the 2025 German federal election campaign on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Combining manual quantitative content analysis of party and candidate posts with large-scale survey data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we assess both strategic use and effectiveness of issue strategies. Our results show that parties strategically prioritize owned issues and those salient on the general public agenda, often combining both dimensions in issue yield strategies. However, these strategies only partly align with what the specific platform audiences value and reward. User engagement is highest for posts that match platform-specific issue preferences, especially when the issues are salient both to a party’s supporters on that platform and to its wider user base. The findings offer new insights into the dynamics of contemporary digital campaigning and cross-platform party competition.