#20 HOW IT'S ACTUALLY DONE: Mobilizing Young Voters

 The data below comes from Serbia. The pattern does not.

Every campaign I've worked with on four continents has arrived at the same wrong conclusion about young voters, and arrived at it the same way: by putting the money where the campaign staff already spends its own time.

The specific numbers here are Serbian, from an Ipsos tracker this July. But the shape of them — a generation gap that runs straight through the middle of the platform mix, and a level of distrust that no amount of reach can buy through — is the same in Nairobi, in Zagreb, in Budapest.

What follows is the part most parties skip: reading the numbers before writing the message.

“Young people aren't interested in politics or in joining parties.” In Serbian political life that sentence gets delivered with a weary sigh, as a premise nobody expects to change. From experience I know they are interested, and more than campaign headquarters assume. What they won't be is free labor putting up posters, or extras filling out the frame at a rally while the leader records a statement. Add the wrong networks and the wrong language on top of that, and it is no surprise the room is empty.

My own read is that elections in Serbia are closer than most of us had planned for — treat that as my expectation, not as a date on a calendar. Either way, it makes the Ipsos Serbia ICT tracker from July 2026 (N=1,004, ages 12 and up) worth reading line by line. It measures who is actually where, and the numbers leave very little room for creative interpretation.

Facebook is where the parents of first-time voters live. It reaches 59% of Serbia's internet population, by a wide margin the largest of any network. Among teenagers that figure is 12%. The heaviest users are people aged 30 to 39, at 78%. Here is the part most people miss: among those over 66 it is still the most popular network in the country, used by 45% of that age group. So a campaign that has quietly reduced “digital” to Facebook is not talking to young people. It is talking to their parents and their grandmothers, and that is the only audience the campaign will find there. Being on Facebook is not the mistake. Believing it settles the youth question is.

Instagram is where the young people everybody keeps talking about actually are. It is used by 92% of teenagers, 82% of people in their twenties and 68% of people in their thirties. Among the over-66s it drops to 22%, which is still not nothing. But being on Instagram and being seen on Instagram are two different things. Story remains the first format a user opens. Reels is the one they keep scrolling. Feed posts, according to Social Serbia 2025 (Pioniri / Smart Plus Research), are largely a habit of people over 35. A campaign that reduces Instagram to a poster design dropped into the feed has made exactly the same error as the Facebook-only campaign — only now on the network where young users are quickest to hide and block.

TikTok use falls off a cliff as age rises, and it stopped being purely an entertainment app some time ago.It reaches 65% of teenagers, 45% of people in their twenties, 30% in their thirties, 27% in their forties and 15% of those over 66. Across the whole internet population that comes to 28%, which looks modest next to Facebook until you look at how it is distributed. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2025, the first edition to include Serbia at all, found that 45% of 18-to-24-year-olds use TikTok as a source of news, roughly the same share as Instagram. That same edition put Serbia at the top of Europe for social media as a news source, at 67%.

The field keeps confirming it. Kenya, June 2024: a Gen Z revolt against the Finance Bill, organized online with almost no formal structure. Nepal, September 2025: a sweeping social media ban pushed organizing onto TikTok and Discord, and inside five days the prime minister was gone. And Serbia, after the railway station canopy collapse in Novi Sad in November 2024, where students have sustained the largest protest movement in decades. In each case activists used two or three platforms to spread information and pull people into the street. Parties need to absorb what that means. For young people these networks are not a leisure activity. They are the infrastructure people use to find out what happened and to organize when it matters most.

X reaches only 9% of internet users, but 19% of people in their twenties, and it is twice as strong in Belgrade, Šumadija and Western Serbia (12%) as in the rest of the country (6%). Read it as a channel to a more urban, better-educated twenty-something, not as a channel to the young population as a whole.

Snapchat is a rounding error nationally at 5%, but nearly a quarter of teenagers use it (24%), and in Vojvodina it is strong enough on its own to almost match every other region combined.

Pinterest is the only network with a large gender split: 5% of men against 17% of women. It also skews young, with 35% of teenagers and 24% of people in their twenties.

LinkedIn is a question of education rather than age: 12% of the university-educated against under 1% of those with only primary schooling. Don't spend time and energy there unless your target is the young professional. Then it makes some sense.

Reach is not trust

The first thing you have to accept is that reach is not trust, and my impression is that most parties and most campaign teams have not accepted it. Social Serbia 2025 found that just 2% of the online population fully trusts the influencers they follow, with the caveat that the 18–34 group extends them more trust than any other age band. Kantar's DIMENSION study found the same shape years earlier and across eight markets: print, broadcast and company websites all came out net-trusted, while social media was the only channel where more people distrusted it than trusted it — with 18–34-year-olds as the single exception. That was 2020, and I don't believe the pattern has softened since. If anything it has deepened, because internet use has grown and content overload has grown with it. The Reuters Institute's 2026 edition now places Serbia at the bottom of Europe for trust in news, at 19%.

So the picture is this. Young people are on the networks where you are looking for them, and they are deeply suspicious of what they read there. A message that smells like a campaign loses them before they finish the visible line of the caption, let alone before anyone taps “more.”

A campaign that “targets young people” with one message on one network is hitting a minority, and a random one at that, if it hits anyone. A teenage girl on Instagram and Pinterest, a twenty-something on X in Belgrade, and a high schooler on Snapchat in Vojvodina are ten years apart on paper and nothing alike in practice. The channel decides whether the message arrives at all. Whether anyone believes it once it turns up in the feed is a separate problem, and that one gets solved with tone and with the visual.

Remember that young people are not one universal target group. They are several, and every one of them can tell the difference between a message written for them and a message that is just the one you sent to the offline press with the long words taken out.

Sources

Ipsos, ICT tracker, July 2026 (N=1,004, ages 12+) — internet and social media use in Serbia. Subscription tracker; figures on file with the author.

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2025 — Serbia country page. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2025/serbia

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2026 — trust in news, Serbia.

Pioniri Communications / Smart Plus Research, Social Serbia 2025 (fieldwork June 2025, N=1,000, ages 12–64, internet users only). pioniri.com/sr/socialserbia2025

Kantar, DIMENSION 2020, “Media must mind the trust gap” (published 21 July 2020; eight markets, connected consumers). kantar.com/inspiration/advertising-media/media-must-mind-the-trust-gap