This study compares the traditional form of political speeches in parliament with social media communication on Facebook by members of parliament of the 18th German Bundestag (2013-2017). While prior studies comparing political communication in parliamentary speeches and on social media mostly focused on Twitter messages, this study uses a unique data set linking parliamentary speeches with public election data, candidate surveys, and MPs’ social media communication on Facebook. The analysis examines individual and party-level factors associated with legislators’ communication activity in parliament and on Facebook. The analysis deploys negative binomial models suitable for over-dispersed count data. The results indicate that party differences and mandate type indeed play an important role in speech activity. However, when controlling for individual-level factors of legislators’ from elite surveys, activity in parliament varies with the openness of MPs personality and norms of representation. For Facebook activity, remarkably, incumbents are less active than non-incumbents and whilst there is an indication that less-party loyal MPs are more active on Facebook, the difference is not significant. The results stress that individual factors and norms of representation matter for legislators’ behaviour in parliament. This underlines the usefulness of data linking for legislative studies and calls for further research on styles of representation and legislators preffered channels of political communication.