The Shifting integrated marketing communication: the 2012 Taiwan presidential election and Facebook

With eight million daily unique visitors from Taiwan, the popularity of Facebook attracts attention from politicians, especially the presidential candidates. Both the incumbent president Ma Ying-jeou and challenger Tsai Ing-wen set up Facebook pages and employ them as an election campaigning tool. How do they use Facebook as a political marketing tool? In order to answer this question, this paper conducted in-depth interviews with 15 participants including six campaign staff, six journalists and three scholars. The findings show that the stages of employing Facebook can be categorized the stage of online relationship developing, the stage of expanding and the stage of harvesting. First two stages represent the brand transferring from real world to virtual world that the candidates’ Facebook pages are the brand of IMC. The last stage includes the Facebook page as one of media outlet of IMC. Through these three stages, switchers play a significant role to influence the effect of Facebook. The process of employing Facebook as a political marketing tool therefore can be viewed as the shifting integrated marketing communication.