Zelf Political Report on TikTok

Welcome to the first Zelf Political Report, where we will be sharing one-of-a-kind TikTok insights and analysis on the current political climate.

What is Zelf?

Zelf is the leading TikTok listening and analytics platform, built with and for companies that are prioritizing the video-based internet for marketing and insights. Zelf gathers organic, people-generated content on TikTok at scale and applies advanced video analytics capabilities to watch and summarize every video. Zelf then provides premier insights, monitors reputation, and allows brands to get ahead of the curve in a world where organic content dominates distribution and consumption.

Zelf has been monitoring individual politicians and political issues on TikTok for months and we can share some fascinating data from June 27, 2024 to July 26, 2024, which clearly demonstrates why TikTok, with its vast amount of people-generated media on politics, will play a crucial role in this year’s election.

Methodology

For this report, Zelf conducted a comprehensive assessment of 153,300 TikTok videos from June 27, 2024 to July 26, 2024, that mentioned Vice President Kamala Harris, President Biden, and former President Donald Trump, as well as key political issues such as immigration, inflation, and reproductive rights. The Zelf assessment monitored the number of videos, views, and engagements, as well as whether the videos were positive, neutral, or negative for any of the candidates or policies being measured. A key metric that Zelf uses is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is an assessment of how positive or negative discourse is about an individual, issue, or topic within a given timeframe, weighted based on video engagement. For an individual commercial post, Zelf accurately ascribes sentiment 97.5% of the time. Measuring political posts is more complex as sentiments are often far more nuanced with some posts expressing both positive and negative sentiments. For individual political posts, Zelf accurately ascribes sentiment 85-90% of the time. Measuring those posts at scale, Zelf's analysis offers the most accurate snapshot by far of political discourse on TikTok. As Zelf continues to analyze political content, it's already high overall accuracy will continue to increase.

Zelf Data & Insights

Since Biden announced on July 21, 2024, that he would not seek a second term and endorsed Harris, TikTok users have posted more than 85,200 videos about Kamala Harris, amassing over 1.8 billion views.
Compare this to Biden, who for months has been trailing (31% more engagements with negative posts than positive posts) with an NPS of -31%.
The majority of these Harris videos were positive (with 49% more engagements with positive content than with negative content), giving Harris an NPS of +49%.
Harris’ boost is comparable to the boost that Trump received after the assassination attempt:

In Trump’s case, the number of videos about him over a seven-day period from July 13, 2024 to July 20, 2024, increased almost eight fold, going from 50,000 videos in the seven days prior to the attempt on his life to over 400,000 the wake of the shooting.
Views on Trump related content skyrocketed from one billion to six billion from July 13, 2024 to July 20, 2024.The shooting at the July 13, 2024, rally had an incredible impact on Trump’s NPS: where for months Trump was burdened with a -24% NPS, after the assassination attempt his NPS surged to +35%
Nevertheless, the collective TikTok memory is short: for the last seven days, Trump’s NPS has dropped back down to -5% and the number of posts/views on Trump content have dropped significantly.

Image 1: Zelf dashboard snapshot for July 25, 2024, monitoring TikTok videos on Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, along with their Net Promoter Scores (NPS).

Image 2: Zelf dashboard for June 27, 2024 to July 26, 2024, with the impact of key events on candidates’ share of attention.

Biden's NPS has improved a bit since his announcement and endorsement of Harris. Prior to his announcement, our analysis showed that his fitness to serve was the main driver of negative content for Biden.

Some interesting data on what Biden’s contributors were to his strongly negative NPS that we saw on TikTok in the past 15 days:

32% of all engagements on Biden-related content was with videos portraying him as unfit to serve.
Biden’s fitness to serve was in itself almost as popular as all the other negative content on any of the other issues we tracked combined (33% of all engagements).
Fitness to serve was clearly an anchor around the president’s neck, outweighing all positive content on all other topics including women’s rights, climate change, and the Supreme Court.

Image 3: Zelf dashboard snapshot for July 25, 2024, monitoring for key issues for this election and the relative share of positive and negative content.

Interested in more TikTok insights for this political cycle? Visit us on www.hellozelf.com

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