IN JUNE Brazil’s elites received a rude introduction to the power of social media. Protests, many convened via Facebook, saw millions take to the streets to air disaffection with politicians. Those same politicians now want to harness social networks for their election campaigns.

Just before Dilma Rousseff was elected president in 2010, 6m Brazilians used Facebook at least once a month. As they gear up for a presidential poll in October, 83m do. Only the United States and India have bigger Facebook populations. One Brazilian in ten tweets; one in five uses Whatsapp—part messaging service, part social network. Cyberspace is seen as a crucial battleground for the election, even before campaigning officially starts on July 6th.


In September, shortly after the protests petered out, Ms Rousseff reactivated her Twitter account, dormant since the 2010 election. She has also joined Instagram and Vine, two image-sharing sites, and revamped her Facebook profile. Last month Ms Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (PT) held its first workshop for activists on how best to use social networks. It plans 13 more in the coming months.

The opposition is pinning even more hope on social media, in large part because the president is likely to dominate the traditional sort. During the campaign free television time is divvied up using a complex formula which takes into account the size of electoral alliances—and tends to favour the incumbent. Despite threats by the PT’s junior partner to dump Ms Rousseff—and take its airtime with itmost pundits predict the coalition will pull through. That would leave the president with around half of the 25-minute television slots; the other candidates would split the rest.

Small wonder, then, that Ms Rousseff’s likeliest rivals have been busy making Facebook friends. Aécio Neves, a senator from Minas Gerais state and leader of the centre-right Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), and Eduardo Campos, governor of Pernambuco and head of the centrist Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), have so far notched up many more likes” than the president (see chart). The most popular of all is Marina Silva, a former environment minister and Mr Campos’s probable running mate. All are active on other social networks, too.






They need to be. Mr Neves and Mr Campos in particular are little known outside their home states. One recent poll of voting intentions puts them at 17% and 12%, respectively, to Ms Rousseff’s 47%. But things could change rapidly. The president’s approval ratings fell sharply, from around 77% to 45%, in the aftermath of the June protests; they have recovered a bit since, but may dip again if more protests erupt during the football World Cup.

At MVL, a digital consultancy in São Paulo that works with Ms Silva, three analysts beaver away, compiling daily reports of her Facebook likes, Twitter mentions and so on. Relevant data are fed into a repository of over 1m e-mails, profiles and handles (usernames) that let Ms Silva reach an estimated 12.5m potential voters, nearly a tenth of the electorate.

It helps to pick the right platform for the right audience. Trying to talk to everyone everywhere is a waste of time,” explains Caio Costa of MVL. In Ms Silva’s 2010 presidential bid, Orkut (now much-diminished but with 26m users at the time) was reserved for Ms Silva’s fellow evangelicals; Facebook for women and disgruntled PT supporters; Google+ for opinion-makers. That helped propel Ms Silva from a rank outsider to 19.3% of the vote.

Mr Neves and Mr Campos will be hoping to repeat the trick and then some. Youngsters are a big target. Nearly 80% of Brazilians aged 16 (the legal voting age) to 25 use the internet at least once a week, well above the national average of 47%. Nearly half go online every day. At 18 voting becomes obligatory, so the candidates’ task is less to get out the vote than ensure the voters tick the right box, says Alexandre Bourgeois, Mr Neves’s social-media wonk.

With that in mind, Mr Bourgeois has dispatched scouts to São Paulo’s poor periphery to identify teenage movers-and-shakers, some with hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers. On February 24th the PSB invited one social-media starlet to a party meeting to discuss the lack of public spaces for teenagers to congregate.






The social networks offer counsel on how to “do an Obama”, in the words of Emmanuel Evita of Twitter, referring to Barack Obama’s astute use of social media in the 2008 presidential race in the United States. In the past few months the microblogging platform and Facebook have both organised tutorials for politicians.

All stress interaction. Reader comments on Mr Campos’s Facebook page rarely go unanswered, for example. Mr Neves has room for improvement, however. He seldom responds to his Facebook visitors; his 28,800 followers on Twitter have yet to see a single tweet. Xico Graziano, his head of internet strategy, insists everything is in place: “We are waiting for an opportune moment to engage.” A series of video clips designed to bolster his profile, including one of Mr Neves riding a motorbike along Brazil’s coast, will hit YouTube this month.

To have greatest effect, however, the candidates must also do well in the battle of television, watched by 65% of Brazilians every day of their lives. The June protests spread in a roundabout way, notes Juliano Spyer, who studies social-media habits in Bahia, in the country’s north-east. The news reached his poor but internet-connected town of 15,000 via television first. Only then was it picked up on “localsocial networks, prompting protests. For the opposition to have a chance in October’s poll, it has to make every screen count.