Political campaigns are embracing the visual social media platform Instagram. One digital feature, the Story, has taken over feed sharing across social media. A Story is a sequence of images or videos uploaded to a profile that disappear after 24 hours. The Story is a novel feature relatively unexamined in political communications and marketing research. Specifically, it is unclear how Gubernatorial candidates employ the Instagram Story feature in campaigning. To address this gap, we content analyze 730 Instagram Stories drawn from 20 Gubernatorial candidate accounts one week before and after Election Day 2018. Results reveal that over half of the candidates employed the Story feature over the two-week period. The Story content primarily included indoor rallies and speeches rather than outdoor canvassing. Campaigns featured more static images than video in Stories and rarely used interactive features, such as animation, location tags, and emojis. Stories were also geared toward mobilization messages rather than voter support, behind-the-scenes looks, and attack ads. Last, some gender and political party differences were evident, as women and Democratic candidates utilized Instagram more.

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告诉我一个 Instagram 故事：短暂的沟通和 2018 年州长选举

政治竞选活动正在拥抱视觉社交媒体平台 Instagram。故事这一数字功能已经取代了社交媒体上的信息共享。故事是上传到个人资料的一系列图像或视频，这些图像或视频会在 24 小时后消失。故事是一个新颖的特征，在政治传播和营销研究中相对未经检验。具体来说，目前尚不清楚州长候选人如何在竞选中使用 Instagram 故事功能。为了解决这一差距，我们对 2018 年选举日前后一周从 20 个州长候选人账户中提取的 730 个 Instagram 故事进行了内容分析。结果显示，超过一半的候选人在两周内使用了故事功能。故事内容主要包括室内集会和演讲，而不是户外拉票。活动在故事中采用的静态图像多于视频，并且很少使用交互功能，例如动画、位置标签和表情符号。故事也旨在传达动员信息，而不是选民支持、幕后花絮和攻击性广告。最后，一些性别和政党差异很明显，因为女性和民主党候选人更多地使用 Instagram。