5 Ways Political Campaigns Should Measure Social Media

Increasing internet access in the United States makes potential voters expect political campaigns to utilize online and social media tools for information sharing and communications. To ensure political campaigns meet these demands, I am sharing five ways political campaigns should measure its social media performance. Adsworth Media can help any political campaign maximize the potential of its online and social media tools to ensure it reaches as many constituents as possible.

1. Reach

Reach reveals how many people see your message across all of the campaign’s active social media networks. Analyzing this will allow you to see how far the campaign’s communications can spread across social media channels.

This includes measuring how many people were willing to join your networks and connect with your campaign. You can do this by counting your total number of Facebook “Fans”, Twitter “Followers”, YouTube subscribers, and other social network friends. It is also helpful to track how many followers the campaign has gained since first setting up these social media channels.

2. Interactions

Interactions demonstrate how much active contact and communications there is about the campaign and its message from the users of your social channels. Analyzing this will allow you to see how people use and share your social media channels. Your campaign must look at how many people comment on status updates, post comments, and share YouTube videos and interesting links to campaign information with others.

This will help you determine if people are using your social media channels in a way that will help spread the word of your campaign. If your channels are not having much activity, the campaign needs to change the way it uses these tools. You need to post more interesting, up-to-date, relative, and informative information that people want to share with their friends.

3. Traffic

Traffic evaluates how often people are visiting your site and social media channels. Analyzing this is crucial. It will allow the campaign to see how visitors find the site, where they come from, how long they stay on the site, what pages are consumed the most, and how many people actually visit your campaign’s website.

This will help you determine if the campaign is utilizing its social media channels in a way that drives people to want to learn more and gather information from the campaign’s website. It will also allow the campaign to see if certain dates garnered more traffic from your social media channels.

If your traffic does show these surges, the campaign needs to distinguish what social media activity took place that day. This will reveal what the campaign’s social media users are most receptive to and found interesting enough to garner more information. The campaign can then change its social media tactics and post in a similar manner that drives increased traffic.

4. Conversions

Conversions assess how many people click through the campaign’s site and social media channels to perform a certain action. The most important conversions for political campaigns to measure are how many people sign up for campaign communications, click for volunteer information, and make donations.

This will help you determine if the campaign makes it easy and inviting for people to perform these actions. It will highlight if the campaign needs to change the layout of its website and social media channels to make them more effective in enticing people to click through and perform these actions.

5. Influence

Influence evaluates how many people actively share and promote your campaign’s information versus glance and leave to find information elsewhere. Analyzing this will allow the campaign to see if it is providing the information people are looking for or if people are going to other channels for information. Your campaign must look at how its messages are influencing online communications, their popularity, and where they show up in search results.

This will help you determine if people find other sites or online tools to be more informative and up-to-date than the campaign’s social media channels. It will also allow the campaign to determine if it is using its social media channels in a way that provides people with the messages they are searching for.

If your communications are hard to find in online searches, the campaign needs to distinguish what sites are more popular and why. This will reveal where people are gathering campaign information and what information is the most popular to share. The campaign can then change how it shares its messages online and post in a similar manner that drives popularity. This may include posting breaking news as it happens, instead of waiting for the traditional press release.