What is Minister Zaldívar looking for with his TikTok account?

On September 14, 2021, TikTok welcomed the Minister President of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), Arturo Zaldivarwho joined the more than 50 million Mexicans who currently use the short video platform (Kepios & ByteDance, 2022). The material with which you opened your account TikTok It was a fragment of his participation during a television newscast talking about the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico and since then he has not stopped sharing content of all kinds with his almost 300,000 followers.

The recommendation of the book he is reading, his musical tastes —among which the music of Taylor Swift stands out— Minister Zaldívar publishes content with which he tries to get on trends —and sometimes, also, to the mame train— and answers questions about your professional activity. Example: “Can the Supreme Court legalize marijuana?”.

According to the Minister President, the justification for his presence on the platform of short videos of Chinese origin is to connect with the young public: “I am the first President of the Court to be on the digital platform of TikTok And I’ve been criticized a lot for that. (…) This is how he communicates with young people today, not with bevels, with totally stiff speeches that respond to another era. The future of Mexico is in them and those who do not understand it is their problem, not mine, ”defends the minister in one of the videos that he stores in his profile.

It is worth clarifying that TikTok became popular in Mexico a little over two years ago, which makes it impossible for a minister-president prior to Zaldivar has been played on this platform.

The analysis of Zaldívar’s account on TikTok

Arturo Zaldívar’s account on TikTok has generated a lot of expectation and positive messages since its creation, according to an analysis carried out by the platform Feel the Oneexpert in monitoring social networks, at the request of The Economist.

The positive reception is explained by showing openness to dialogue with their followers, generating community through hashtags such as #aprendeentiktok #curiousdata #SCJN.

Users of TikTok They have expressed their support for him through comments and reactions on his videos, which range from 3 million “I like it” (likes) in the more than 260 videos that he has shared from his official account. Her followers have been in favor of all the information she shares and there are even those who express love and admiration for her. ��

If the account of the minister Zaldivar belonged to a corporate brand, your marketing team would be celebrating to see the results of the evaluation during the last month, carried out by Feel the One. Taking into account the relationship between positive and negative comments, the account and the engagement caused (user interactions) have an “Excellent” rating, that is, the brand is loved on the internet with 0.95 on a scale of 0 to 1.

The political showcase

Andrés García, director of the Ayopa Political Marketing Agency, assures that the popularity of TikTok has turned it into an attractive tool for those interested in running for public office, since it is a channel that seeks the approval and empathy of a young public, although it states that its effectiveness in electoral processes has not yet been proven.

“There are no studies that support that there is a correlation between the young vote and the use of the platform of TikTok. Some efforts have been made in Latin America to try to study the phenomenon, but there is no concrete evidence. The possibility that there is a connection between the intention of the vote and the platform of TikTok”, said García, who is a graduate of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the UNAM.

With your account in TikTokit is clear that the Minister Zaldivar allocates part of his time to generating audiovisual material to feed his profile on one of the most popular social platforms, owned by the Chinese company ByteDanceand that stands out for the immediacy in the consumption of content.

Does Minister Zaldívar have a strategy?

García assures that there is no objective that a strategy on the part of Zaldivar: “It seems to me that it responds more to a personality issue of the minister than to a strategy with an objective. In the characters that go to an election, of course, it is used for those purposes, but in the matter of the minister, I honestly do not find the strategy.

Criticism of the work he leads Zaldivar in the social network of Chinese origin revolves around pointing out the issues and trends it addresses, which on many occasions do not address topics related to the work of the Judiciary: “It could be a tool that helps bring people closer to the issue of the Judiciary; however, I think that the segment of TikTok I would be interested in a million things before being interested in matters of jurisprudence or the Court”

The expert explains that the attempts to position messages on the short video platform are far from bearing fruit, since the immediacy factor limits their analysis and understanding: “In all social networks, with the exception of Twitter, users are very little analytical and rather very ephemeral, everything happens in a minute. A video was uploaded, a blockbuster, 20 seconds long and it’s already passed on my timeline. It no longer works. But TikTok it is especially more ephemeral than all networks”.

ivan.quezada@eleconomista.mx

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