The use of memes in the discourse of political parties at Twitter: analysis of the 2015 state of the nation debate

The transition between traditional politics to social media has given rise to new spaces, forms and languages for political communication. Visual aspects have been crucial in this process and political parties have tried to integrate them into their web presence. Those images are carefully selected in order to have an impact and foster engagement on Twitter, especially in the form of memes. This paper therefore analyses the use of images in the digital discourse of Spanish political parties on Twitter. Content analysis is used as the preferred research method to study how such visual content was used by the main political party accounts –typology of images, communication strategies, main hashtags, impact, etc – during the 2015 State of the Nation Debate in Spain. Likewise, content analysis was complemented with the thematic tagging of graphics memes by analysing the meanings of the text (image and text). Our work has revealed significant differences in the use of memes by political parties in the Spanish Parliament. The paper also highlights Twitter accounts with high memetic potential.