Social networking sites are essential for any political campaign, as they help candidates in winning their elections and build a stronger campaign message.
How social networking sites help political campaigns? Campaigns can manage their online reputation, do political fundraising, voter targeting, build online communities, analyze voters’ sentiments, connect with voters immediately, and increase their messaging outreach using social media.
Let’s see how campaigns leverage social networking sites to win elections.
Managing Online Reputation
In any political campaign, different candidates are busy running smear campaigns against each other. As technology advances and political campaigns start using the internet, these smear campaigns are now transferred online, particularly to social media. So, all social networking sites help political campaigns to tackle the smear campaign and negative propaganda against themselves. Without tackling this propaganda, it is next to impossible to win an election these days since voters will continue to consume negative content against you if you don’t develop a proper strategy to combat it.
Building Communities
Social networking sites help political campaigns to build a whole community of voters who can participate in different activities to promote the campaign. For instance, campaigns can mobilize their voters in social media communities like Facebook groups, Twitter spaces, and WhatsApp groups to spread their words to their relevant constituency. Similarly, voters who are eager enough to promote the campaign themselves can also make their own communities and plan different activities like public rallying. Political campaigns also run whole networks of online communities to mobilize their voters whenever needed.
Personal Branding of Campaigns
Modern-day political campaigns are turning out to be brands these days. Just like businesses do their branding on social media, political campaigns also do the same. All campaigns must ensure that they are settling their terms with their voters, who have the actual power to vote for the candidates. So, social networking sites allow political campaigns to establish their brand and build a highly engaged audience which is emotionally attached to that brand.
Analyzing Voters’ Sentiments
Analyzing the sentiments of your voters is a must thing to do in any political campaign. You can easily see whether your voters are happy, sad, worried, or amazed using sentiment analysis on social networking sites.
You can either analyze the type of comments your voters are putting under your posts or see how they are reacting to your posts. Not only this, but you can also see the comments of your voters at different places throughout social networking sites through modern-day data mining services. This strategy is called digital listening or sentiment analysis and is widely incorporated by modern-day political campaigns.
Messaging Outreach
Messaging outreach is critically important for any political campaign since your opposition candidates are always doing it. If you are not promoting your message, your rival candidate will tarnish your online reputation. Voters will start believing the things about you that you have never preached. Consequently, you will lose your elections easily.
But you do not have to worry at all. Social networking sites provide incredible messaging outreach opportunities for political campaigns. In the traditional campaign setup, you need to spend top dollars to attract people who can see your campaign stuff, but this is not the case when you campaign on social networking sites.
Once you develop a significant follower base on any social networking website, you can make any of your posts viral by simply posting them on these websites. Your voters will share your content, which will eventually increase your messaging outreach to your voters.
Collecting Voters’ Data
Political campaigns are data-driven these days, unarguably. And social networking sites can be the primary source of data collection for any political campaign. Smart campaigns use these websites to get the data of their voters, which they use to target the voters later on. Some of the important types of data gathered by political campaigns include names, emails, phone numbers and date of birth of voters. By using this data, political campaigns can make a personal connection with their potential voters. Additionally, you get massive voter data using Facebook ads, which is beneficial for your overall election campaign. If you utilize social networking sites properly, you will have a database of the online profiles of your voters, which you can use to promote your election campaign.
Fundraising for Elections
Social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, offer invaluable opportunities for political campaigns to reach potential supporters and contributors. Campaigns can leverage these networks to target key demographics in their bid for office. Engaging citizens in often lively conversations on their feeds gives campaigns a chance to solicit donations from a much wider audience than ever before. And since it’s easy for people to share information quickly on these sites with the click of a button, large numbers of small contributors have been mobilized, allowing elected officials and candidates access to important resources needed to achieve success.
Some of the famous ways political campaigns use social networking sites for fundraising include:
- Put a donation page link in the bios of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
- Announce and promote a physical fundraiser on social networking sites. This way, people will get to know that you are arranging a fundraiser, which will help them in connecting to your campaign. You can do this by creating an event on a social media site.
- Put a small donation reminder at the end of your visuals which you put on social networking websites.
Directly Engaging with Voters
One of the most effective ways of doing political campaigns on social media websites is to go live on these platforms and talk to your voters. In the traditional setup, politicians go on talk shows for campaigning purposes. But every talk show has its own restriction. So, now, if you are running for a public office, you can easily go live on social media platforms to speak to your loyal voter base. You have no restrictions whatsoever when you are doing your own live session. Always remember that you must share the same live session on every social media platform to increase your message outreach.
Strengthening Omnichannel strategy
Social networking websites also help political campaigns to create an omnichannel campaign strategy. While omnichannel marketing is famous in businesses, many campaigns ignore this tactic which is detrimental to them. Social media websites are part and partial of creating any omnichannel campaign strategy since you need to keep your social media handles up to date to keep voters engaged. Similarly, you must ensure that voters get the same message when they tune in to your different social media handles so that they do not feel disconnected.
Minimizing Communication Gap Between Voters and Politicians
Social networking sites eliminate all the communication barriers between voters and politicians. It is now easy to reach hundreds of thousands of followers on your social media pages by uploading a single post. Your voters can also get connected to you by commenting below your posts. And the best thing about social networking websites is that political campaigns can answer the queries of each and every single voter individually, which further attaches the voters to the campaigns.
Politicians also use social media websites widely to make public announcements or to share their press releases with the world immediately. As people consume social media more than traditional media, they also interact with these public announcements immediately, which helps politicians to spread their words to the masses.
Voter Targeting
Social media sites have completely revolutionized the concept of voter targeting. Using social media platforms, you can easily target your desired voter group to achieve maximum conversions.
For instance, if you think you need the votes of young voters to win the elections, you can specifically target this voter group using social media ads. This way, only relevant people will watch your ads, which will eventually increase voters’ interest in your election campaign.