Urmas Seaver, head of the Riigikogu's public relations department, told ERR that the aim of the €6,800 social media campaign is to increase the number of followers the Estonian parliament has on Instagram and Facebook. To do this, three companies were invited to bid for the contract and Goal Marketing OÜ was the winner.

"This campaign is actually already up and running and posts addressed to young people are appearing on our Facebook and Instagram accounts. The company's idea was to involve an influencer who has a very large following among young people and can reach out to encourage them to look at the Riigikogu's social media channels," said Seaver.

Marko Saue, creative director of Goal Marketing, told ERR that the company has done media campaigns for the Riigikogu before. However, on this occasion, they decided to try to engage with young people in a way that was more interesting and relevant to them.

"Then came the idea of involving an influencer, a well-known young person who interests young people. When we were discussing it, the first idea was Arija Helmvee, aka Roosabanaanike, who has a very large following on TikTok," said Saue.

The Riigikogu does not currently have an account on TikTok, so people can only see Roosabanaanike and her Riigikogu-related posts on Facebook and Instagram.

According to Saue, the aim of the campaign is to show that members of the Riigikogu are ordinary people just doing their jobs. For that reason, the idea was to encourage young people to send questions to Riigikogu MPs, which is something Roosabanaaniike will ask for.

"We let the young people themselves send in questions about what they want to know from the members of the Riigikogu. We filtered the questions, we took out any rude or silly things, and we added some real-life questions, such as 'what is your favorite sport or pet?'" said Saue.

The €6,800 for the campaign comes from the Riigikogu's budget and will be used to help distribute media clips as well as cover Roosabanaanike's fee for instance.

Seaver said the last time the Riigikogu ran a social media campaign like this was three or four years ago. The aim now is to increase the number of followers the Riigikogu has on social media.

"It seems to me that from time to time we could still try to increase the number, because that's where we show the work of the Riigikogu and its history as well as talk about democracy. These are still important things in Estonian society and I think that small campaigns could be run every few years. I think that would be justified," Seaver said.

According to Seaver, the number of followers the Riigikogu's social media pages have will be monitored to see whether the campaign actually leads to an increase.

"In fact, we can already see that at least on the Instagram account there are now a few dozen more people, and well, the campaign is still going," he said.

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