Pics or it didn’t happen! EU institutions’ visual communication and user engagement on Facebook and Instagram

Social media often follow a visual logic found to increase engagement, as images are more likely to attract attention and present information on a holistic-associative basis. For a political entity like the EU, social media is a promising route to overcome the remoteness to its citizens, identified as one of the crucial challenges to its public legitimacy. Against this broader background, our study analyses the influence of 10 years of EU visual social media communication on user engagement as an indicator of successfully creating visibility in a crucial communication space. For this purpose, we conducted an image-type analysis, combining quantitative and qualitative features of visual analysis: First, a sub-sample of posts was inductively analyzed to identify recurring image types, and subsequently used to implement a manual quantitative visual content analysis. Building on the results, we drew on a machine learning approach, allowing us to analyze over 40,000 posts, including more than 20,000 pictures. Our results emphasize the crucial influence of social media affordances in explaining user engagement with EU visual social media communication. Implications are discussed with reference to the ongoing discussion about the EU’s democratic deficit.