Impact of Facebook Likes and Shares on Campaign Posts in Predicting the 2016 Philippine Presidential Election Results

Impact of Facebook Likes and Shares on Campaign Posts in Predicting the 2016 Philippine Presidential Election Results   Cherryl M. Lauron, MDC1 1Department of Development Communication, Adventist University of the Philippines che.lauron@gmail.com   Introduction:   The active usage of the Filipinos in the social media application called Facebook may influence the society, the election campaign and result but hard evidence is scarce. Hence, this study intends to analyze how the engagement of users through ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ on the Facebook campaign posts can predict the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.   Methods: The study delved on interpreting how Facebook as a communication channel predicted the election result based on the engagement in likes and shares in the Facebook campaign posts. Only the number of likes and shares of the posts based on the total count on the original post on the candidates’ official Facebook page were analyzed. These were posted during the campaign period declared by the Commission on Elections. The social net importer was used in the data gathering process then the calculation using a statistical tool followed as basis for analysis.     Results: The official election result from the COMELEC confirmed that Rodrigo Duterte won in the 2016 Presidential election with a total of 16,601,997 votes. Grace Poe secured the highest number of likes and shares, 13,036,065 likes and 1,511,020 shares, respectively but she only ranked as third in the official election. Results show that the number of likes and shares on the Facebook election campaign posts are not significant in predicting the election result.   Discussion: Future studies in relation to Philippine Presidential election may be conducted and other variables can be considered like the Presidential debate likes and shares, comments, and other Facebook reactions like heart, wow, sad and thankful.   Keywords: Facebook Likes, Facebook Shares, Campaign Posts, 2016 Philippine Presidential Election Results