Guest AuthorDuring the primary, I did Facebook consulting through Brett Doster, Front Line Strategies, Inc. for the House campaigns of Jay Trumbull and Jay Fant. For Fant, the turning point of the campaign, on Facebook, was when SaintPetersBlog published this article.
Until then, we were reaching only 300 to 400 people organically, meaning the campaign did not have to pay for an ad to get a post in someone’s timeline. We posted the article from the blog to Facebook in the evening. The next morning we had already reached over 1,000 people who saw the article organically on Facebook.
The campaign then set up a very targeted audience in the district and we bought advertising to reach this group. In 24 hours, this article had reached over 14,000 people up to an average of four times each. We had 196 likes, 27 comments and 33 shares. Very successful for very little cost.
At the end of the campaign, Paul Renner, the opposition, had 394 likes and Jay Fant had 1,045 likes. With some tools from Facebook that we were able to program, we were able to cross-match Facebook IDs to voters and have our team follow-up on those who had not voted. We also were able to confirm who lived in the district and had liked the Facebook page.
By the end of the campaign, we were reaching well over a 1,000 people organically with many of our posts. That was true of both campaigns. In fact, the last post of the Trumbull campaign reached almost 2,000 Facebook timelines without spending a penny on advertising.
With very little money we were able to let everyone who liked us and their friends know about our walks. By the end, we were reaching most of this group without advertising. This group that liked us are the “social” media people that are interested in politics. These are the activists others turn to for advise about whom to vote for.
Facebook tells you within hours what content is working and what ads are working. For my most successful ads, the campaign paid as little as $.08 per engagement. An engagement is someone taking action on your post. For ads that people were not interested in, we paid as much as $2.70 per engagement. But before we paid $5 on a bad ad, we were able to kill that ad. The cost per one of our ads to appear in someone’s timeline averaged out to about $.006. What a deal!
Another thing that Facebook allows you to do is interact with the voters. Trumbull was great at this. Facebook sends you an email when you get a new comment or message. He would answer most of these right away.
The people who ask you questions are the ones who are very interested in politics and usually have a network of friends they interact with. When you get these people on board, they will bring their network with them.
It was interesting the kind of posts that are popular on Facebook. First, Facebook requires that your posts be certain sizes. If you don’t make them the correct size, parts of your graphic are cut off. You cannot have more than 20 percent text in your graphics.
The ads that worked best were the personal post. When advertising for likes, we always used six different graphics and Facebook automatically tests and promotes the graphics that get the best results. For Trumbull, a picture of Jay and Brittany his wife and dog walking on the beach was one of the top “like” getters.
For Fant, one of the top “like” getters was Fant with his daughter fishing.
We were pleasantly surprised when we posted a picture of Trumbull and his wife. In the post, we gave the background of his wife. This post had a very strong response. So we targeted the audience and put a little money behind it to reach most of his district. We ended up with 177 likes.
The best posts were the ones with kids, family and dogs. Pictures of the candidate walking and waving signs were also good. I think you need to have posts with issues. There are voters who want to know where the candidate stands. More important to a lot of voters in a primary is to know the candidate is like them and working hard for their vote.
You can post too often. Do not post more than once a day. If you post more, your post does not have a chance to reach your whole audience. This will bring down your reach for all posts.
If you post too often, people will begin to consider you spam.
For years I worked in redistricting for the Florida House of Representatives. There I analyzed elections. After leaving the House, I analyzed many candidates’ Facebook friends and likes. I discovered that very few of the people that were their friends or liked a candidate were in their districts. There must be a better way to target the message and make social media more effective. This primary election has proven a lot of the theories of how to use Facebook in campaigns.
Social media is the future. If you are a candidate, you need to invest in a Facebook page first. You need to work to build the number of people in your district who “like” you to over 1,000 “likes.” You need to not spam your Facebook likers by posting more than once a day.
You do need a plan to make sure you reached 90 percent of your targeted group with ads every week during the last month of the campaign.
Bob West is President of VotersDNA.org LLC. Bob does campaign consulting and database management and programming for candidates and other organizations. You can reach Bob at [email protected]. 850-322-5950. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
