Use of social media as an instrument of perception management in election periods: analysis of Local Elections on March 31, 2019 via twitter

Developments in new communication technologies have differentiated interpersonal and mass communication mediums. With the emergence of social media,there has been a new alternative to traditional medium in political field likewise transformations have taken place in every field of daily life. Nowadays, these alternative media mediums are widely used in election periods. In political communication, campaigns are carried out by political parties or candidates with the aim of convincing the voters, mobilizing them in the desired direction and consequently directing them to voting behavior. In order to these campaigns to achieve the targeted success, parties or candidates should manage the perceptions towards them. In this context, perception management can be defined as public opinion efforts. Perception management process, as in the classical communication process, consists of source, receiver, message, channel, feedback elements and "the channel" where messages are given within the scope of perception management is great importance. Considering the developments in new communication technologies today, it is seen that social media is used as an important channel in reaching, influencing and directing the voter population in political communication campaigns due to its features such as communicating with large masses more efficiently, less cost and enabling interaction. Thus, this study has been carried out for the use of social media as a tool of perception management during election periods. In this study, 31 March 2019 local election mechanisms of İstanbul are analysed with a focus on Twitter contents shared between 1st and 31st of March by province candidate Binali Yıldırım and Ekrem İmamoğlu. Therefore, this study aims to understand if social media was used as a tool of perception management or not and if so it is aimed to reveal which of the elements of perception management are given more emphasis. As a result of the findings of the study, it can be argued that both of the candidates included elements of perception management in their messages and some of the parameters were preferred over others.