Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Social Media Campaign Tips

As a political candidate, your online presence is one of the most important things you can control. Your public image can be heavily affected by the way you appear on the Internet. We've looked at candidates' pages, and found the following tips for establishing a solid web presence.There are three primary networks you should focus on as a political candidate, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Each of these sites target a different demographic, and require different tactics to utilize them properly. The following are a few tips we found while searching through some candidates' pages.


YouTube
Most political campaigns already prepare TV ads, expand your reach by uploading all of your materials to YouTube. Not only does it increase your online presence, it gives media outlets an official source for campaign materials. Plus, it provides an easy way to add video capability to your campaign site, all hosted for free and integrated with minimum effort. Posting regular updates to YouTube is important, updates are pushed out to all followers of your channel.
Remember that there is no distribution cost for videos placed on YouTube, use this to your advantage. Upload anything that might be of interest to the public relating to your campaign, whether it be recent speeches, a response to a statement, or clips from a recent interview. Having your videos up for public consumption allows you to appear more transparent to the public, and it costs next to nothing. Additionally, news stations have picked up the trend of using YouTube as a source for videos on candidates in the running. The videos you upload to YouTube just may get some free airtime.
Additional Tips:
  • Upload often. You want to give the impression that your campaign is active. Uploading videos of events, campaign ads, and speeches raises online awareness of these events.
  • Highlight videos are good. Ordinary YouTube accounts are limited to 10 minutes, but most viewers just want to see the good bits. Uploading long passages in multi-part formats is acceptable, but make sure you have something to placate the less interested user.
  • Embed your videos into your campaign site. Videos are a good way to get your message across in a quick, condensed form. Your landing page should have some sort of introduction to yourself as a political candidate, with recent video updates off to the side. Just make sure to avoid auto-playing videos—these are likely to turn off visitors very quickly.
Twitter
So far, Twitter has shown to be a primary gathering spot for media outlets and people dedicated to particular causes. Twitter is nice because it gives you easy, direct contact with your supporters and followers, via @ replies. Additionally, the mainstream media has been using Twitter as sources for stories; it’s hard to take something out of context when it’s only 140 characters.
Additional Tips:
  • Don’t feel obligated to follow anyone outside of direct campaign workers. You can still see what people are saying about you in your replies. You should almost always have more followers than people you’re following.
  • Not everything you say on Twitter has to be important. Updating like a normal person helps people relate to you more. You might want to run two profiles, one for personal use and one for your campaign.
  • Add images. Services like Twitpic, yfrog, and tweetphoto add some flair to your stream, again helping your followers relate to you as a person in addition to the campaign. Sending a few candid pictures of various events on the fly helps people stay interested in the events at hand. (It’s really easy to update these from a BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android device.)
Facebook
Facebook’s public pages are a great way to communicate with a mass audience. In many ways, a public facebook page serves as a sort of minisite for your campaign, allowing you to post links to your blog posts, videos, and status updates. There’s a good chance that many visitors to your facebook page are not the same type of people that frequent your campaign page. Make sure that your posts, links, and videos show that you are an active candidate on the scene, and that the overall feel of the page matches your agendas. It’s relatively easy to update Facebook with your activity on other sites, having your other sites update Facebook is very useful in keeping your followers up to date.
Additional Tips:
  • Update often, but not as often as Twitter. You might want to link your Facebook page with the campaign page I mentioned earlier, as opposed to your personal feed. Facebook users like to see occasional updates from the pages they are following, but they’re primarily interested in their friends. Twitter is much more even as far as engagement rates for followers.
  • Link your page to important events, videos, and blog posts. While twitter is handy for this, Facebook serves better as a hub for information, as you’re given much more space on your profile page. Fill it up with campaign info, upcoming events (don’t use invites, just post them), and videos about your campaign.
  • For the most part, disregard comments made on posts. This sounds awful, but really, those threads get large and off-topic. Twitter’s @ system is much more focused, as someone has to take actual effort to mention you. Their comments could be good for analysis, but other than that, there really isn’t much to them that’s worth replying to personally.

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