January 2022 Irish Political Party Social Media Stats

11 January 2022
By Elaine Murphy
elaine@TheCork.ie

Recent photo of Cork South Central TD Micheál Martin. The Corkman is also the leader of Fianna Fail and Taoiseach

A social media analysis by Cork-based Mulley Communications of the social media accounts of political parties has shown that Sinn Féin has the biggest following across all social media networks while Leo Varadkar is the party leader with the most followers on social media.

Sinn Féin has the biggest Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube numbers. Sinn Féin also has the most YouTube views with 18.7M views. However, Leo Varadkar has more Facebook, Twitter and Instagram followers than all the political parties in Ireland and would be number one if he was his own party (make of that what you will)

Damien Mulley from Mulley Communications commented

“There has not been any major shifts in followers of the political parties since the last general election. However during the pandemic the Twitter followers of Leo Varadkar rose by almost 200,000 and since becoming Taoiseach Micheal Martin has seen an increase in his followers on social media.”

“As more people move to Instagram and TikTok, this has not been reflected in increasing numbers on these platforms by political parties, apart from strong growth on TikTok by Sinn Féin and Simon Harris”

Irish Political Party Social Media

**  Labour and Fine Gael have not shown subscriber numbers for YouTube

Party Leaders

Leo Varadkar is the party leader with the most followers on social media with over 720,000 followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Mary Lou McDonald has the next highest number of followers with 370,000 followers and Micheál Martin has 179k followers.

Mary Lou McDonald has the greatest amount of Facebook followers. To note: Facebook has the oldest demographic where almost the majority of people are 40 or over. Instagram and TikTok have much younger demographics.

Party Leader Social Media 

Micheal Martin saw a large bump in Twitter followers and a slight increase in Facebook followers since his election to Taoiseach:

The Fianna Fáil party didn’t see the same bump though

While Mulley Communications couldn’t find TikTok accounts for any party leader, Simon Harris is King of TikTok with 89k followers https://www.tiktok.com/@simon_harristd and has more followers than the political parties.

An analysis by Mulley Communications from last week showed the breakdown of social media use in Ireland:

2.6M users on Instagram
2.7M users on Facebook
Facebook’s demographic is growing older
Instagram soon to be bigger than Facebook in Ireland
2.1M users on TikTok

Party Breakdown by Social network

Facebook Numbers

Twitter Numbers

Instagram Numbers

TikTok Numbers