The Effect of Integrated Political Marketing Communications and Social Media on the Selection of Candidates in the Tenth Parliament Election

Using marketing principles, concepts and tools in political activities and competitions is one of the exciting new functions of marketing. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of integrated political marketing communications in the context of social media on the selection of candidates in the tenth election of parliament. The population of this study includes voters of the tenth election of Parliament in the cities of Shiraz, Semnan and Ilam. Research methodology, in terms of purpose, is applied, and the method of data collection is descriptive. It is a co-relational study based on structural equations. According to the infinity of the population, 384 persons were selected for sampling. Sampling method is accidental. The data collection tool is a standard questionnaire. Making the questionnaire indigenous and investigating its validity, the researchers have used the views of the academic experts and for its reliability, combination reliability is used. To analyze the data structured equation, LISREL software is used. The results showed that integrated political marketing communications and social media have a positive and significant impact on the selection of candidates. Moreover, dimensions of integrated Political marketing communications (including political advertising, political sales promotion, political PR and direct political marketing) have a significant positive impact on candidate selection.