Trade unions have faced the significant problem of member decline for several decades, even in countries with traditionally high union membership like Sweden. Social media have been proposed as an important means for revitalization strategies because it is fast, cheap and has the potential to reach many. The purpose of this study is to investigate how Swedish trade unions use social media for revitalization purposes; we do this by focusing on one social media channel, the YouTube. By combining unique meta-data of more than four thousands videos and detailed data about 400 videos, we demonstrate that Swedish trade unions use social media for member recruitment and political activism, but much less for coalition building. We also find some interesting variation between the three main trade union federations, which call for future research about the variation of revitalization strategies.
