Social Media and Elections

Photo credit: Pixabay user Geralt

As we enter into the next election season, let’s delve into the communication strategy of candidates. After all, an election campaign is basically a communication campaign, albeit with pretty high stakes. In the 2008 and 2012 presidential races, Barrack Obama deployed a strategic approach to social media that leveraged innovative tools for a successful outcome. Never before had a candidate broadly used social media in such a manner. Taking it to another level in 2012, the campaign adapted to new technologies like behavior modeling and large scale data analytics (Bimber, 2014). Carefully crafted, personalized messages were key to the campaign’s communication strategy. 

Video game photo credit: NBC News 
Infographic created by TMoller via Canva.com

It only makes sense for political candidates to show up where the voters are. The candidate who can win social media may very well win the next presidential election. The math makes sense. Stay with me here - roughly eight-in-ten, or 77% of Snapchat users ages 18-29 use the platform daily. Nearly as many, 68% say they use it more than once a day. As for Instagram, 76% of this age group says they use the platform daily with 60% saying they use it more than once daily. Millennials, those ages 23-38 (notice how they fit into the above stats?) and Generation Z, the youngest generation ages 7-22 (yep, they fit into the stats above, too) together share liberal-leaning opinions on key issues. And, nearly half of Generation Z is an ethnic or racial minority.

Millennials and Generation Z are both showing up to the polls in steadily increasing numbers. Perhaps the next presidential hopefuls should take a page from the Obama social media engagement playbook.