Peculiarities of Communicative Practices of Ukrainian Political leaders on the Facebook

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of the use of social media (namely the Facebook network) in local political image construction. The main research tool is content analysis. With its help the basic characteristics of popular Ukrainian politicians' communicative strategies are fixed and traced. The research reveals that the political leaders profile contains original posts, which is rather important to sustain interaction with their citizenry online. Comments to other users’ posts are of critically important to provide a constant link with the audience. We don’t fix the increasing of visual information in political discourse on the contrary to the common trends in the Net development. The data obtained can be used to construct effectively the individual image of politicians who want to establish constructive interaction with the electorate through the Facebook network. Certain recommendations can be used to perfect the communication between the political leaders and their electorate locally and globally.