Nigel Farage’s Brexit party was the top-spending political campaign on Facebook in Britain last week as it ramped up a push for the support of over-40 voters in the European elections.



Widely perceived as a serious threat to Theresa May’s Conservatives, Farage’s new party spent £11,523 pushing its pro-Brexit messages on the UK’s most widely used social network, according to Facebook data — nearly twice as much as that of the main parties, Labour and the Tories.

In total, the Brexit party has spent around £20,000 since it formally launched two weeks ago. In contrast, the Remain-supporting Change UK, another new party with big ambitions for next month’s European ballot, only just started its Facebook push today.

Separate data reviewed by BuzzFeed News reveal that Farage’s new party has been given a significant publicity boost by Facebook users organically sharing news articles relating to the launch, without the Brexit party having to pay anything for it.

A column written by Farage for the Daily Telegraph newspaper on the morning of the Brexit party launch on April 11 received more than 110,000 engagements on social media, making it the fourth-most-shared UK politics story of the last month, according to BuzzFeed News’ analysis of data from BuzzSumo, a company that tracks social sharing.

The main amplifier of the article was Farage’s own official Facebook page, which has a community of more than 830,000 viewers. News articles about the Brexit party have also been given a huge bump by the Facebook account of Leave.EU, the pro-Brexit campaign backed by Arron Banks.

Facebook’s data suggests that the Brexit party’s advertisements have so far been viewed up to 2.2 million times, helping raise the profile of Farage’s new venture as he seeks to become the biggest party in the May 23 poll. Broken down by gender, the audience for the ads appears to be heavily skewed towards men. Viewed by age group, the audience is overwhelmingly over 45.