How Can Social Media Monitoring Influence Political Campaigns?

The political landscape has shifted too many gears in the last few years. One aspect that is witnessing advanced changes in politics is the way politicians carry out elections or other political campaigns. Running a campaign is not an easy task. All eyes are on you and you cannot risk a single move. With different candidates, public perception, and aggressive opponents, political campaigning becomes a stressful event.

However, social media has contributed its fair share in politics to ease out the campaigning process. It is like the new tool that gauges audience movement closely and subsequently and leads to alteration in political strategies.

Nevertheless, tracking web and social media platforms is an overwhelming task. In a study of 2000 respondents, 37% reported being active in political debates or discussions on social media. Engaging with such users and keeping track of their activities can be exhausting.

To solve this overload of work, social media monitoring can come to your rescue. Just like social media monitoring helps retail brands and healthcare facilities, it can help political parties too. It can prepare an exhaustive list of actionable analytics for and of your political campaigns.

Therefore, in this article, we are taking you through the guide of how social media monitoring can affect your political campaigns in this day and age. Let us dive into the topic.

How Does Social Media Monitoring Enhance Political Campaigns?

#1 Reveals What Goes Into the Mind of a Voter

In every political campaign, it is crucial to figure out the general mindset of the voters. Until now, print media and broadcast journalism have played a big role in unearthing what voters across the constituencies want.

By the virtue of the Internet and its penetration into the world of politics, you have easier, direct, and credible ways to get into the minds of voters. According to a study, seven in ten people use Facebook daily. Also, this study states that 49% of Facebook users visit the platform several times a day. 59% use Instagram and Snapchat collectively daily and furthermore, Americans are not only going to social media just for news but also to speak about their political views there. These opinions can help a political advisor or campaign strategist to shape the narrative.

Let’s say, for example, the voters of a certain state prioritize economic boost and climate change. With the help of social media monitoring, you can assess the dialogue of voters and conclude that these two aspects hold utmost significance for them. If you have been giving enough importance to these areas, it’s a good confidence boost. If not, you now know what to change.

#2 Explains the Perception of the Voters

Earlier, people used to discuss and debate over their opinions in bars and discussion forums. Social media has replaced it. A voter may not voice their positive opinion out loud, but they are most likely to give their two cents on what is wrong with political parties and agenda on their Instagram live and Facebook stories. It is 100% true for a specific age group, that is the Millennials and Gen Z, who are a major chunk of your voter base.

Therefore, if you need to know how the state or nation is pursuing your party, social media monitoring can help you. By crawling and indexing the web and social platforms in real-time, it can compute the popularity and perception of your name in no time.

Once you figure out your image in public, you can use a social listening tool to track the reason behind it. If certain aspects of your political campaign boost your public image, focus more on them and win the undecided voters. Similarly, if you find your reputation worsening, detect the concerns and problems and incorporate the solutions into your campaign afterward.

Source: Slideshare

Barack Obama used social media and its monitoring in the 2008 USA elections. It was the first time when a political leader saw social media for its far-reach, and democratic nature to connect to the audience. The party used almost every online platform available and popular then — Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Podcasts, Reddit, etc. This active participation on social media to raise awareness and increase engagement worked in the favor of Obama. The nation witnessed a landslide victory.

#3 Enables Political Sentiment Analysis of the Voters

Sentiment analysis is the interpretation of emotions which is further followed by its classification into categories like positive, negative, and neutral. Social media monitoring tools can assist you in scanning the sentiments of the voters.

You have seen in the above excerpts how media monitoring can help you know what, where, how, and when are the voters talking about you. You can move a step ahead and have a peek into the hearts and minds of the voters and know why they are talking about you.

If you start determining the feelings of the people and the reason behind it, you have the right data to figure out what to do, what not to do, and how to change feelings. Use these insights to create a more wholesome political strategy that can tackle neutral and negative opinions. To sum up, sentiment analysis gives you an opportunity to reassess your political campaign approach.

#4 Tracks Your Opponent Party

Just like every other industry, politics also demand to keep track of their competitors to be successful. You are in a real-time, neck-to-neck competition with the other political party. If you are not devoting enough time to track their campaign activities, you are making a mistake.

Social media monitoring enables competitor analysis that helps you be a step ahead of your competitors at all times. Their performance is a big indicator of how you should conduct your political campaign. If the opponent’s strategy is resonating with the voters, you need to come up with a better alternative. Similarly, if their campaign is unable to deliver the message the right way, you can come up and lead the communication by filling the gap. In brief, you can learn from the mistakes and strengths of the opponent.

One of the most common activities seen in the political campaign is attacking each other’s party and leaders, especially when the election day is close. Twitter, the most preferred platform for politicians all around the world, has become a war zone of 280 characters. Top leaders have a huge number of following and hence, one tweet can spread like wildfire across the Internet. With the help of a social listening tool, you can track the attacks in real-time. Moreover, you can find out the reaction of the public to it and accordingly judge what action you need to take in response if any at all. In this way, you can always be prepared for a counter-attack.

Source: Twitter

#5 Collaborate With Influencers

The aim of every political party is to enhance its reach to as many people as possible. One of the most effective ways to do so that has become a popular trend too is collaborating with the right influencers.

The impact of influencer marketing has rocketed up a lot in the last few years. Finding the right people can help you promote your party message. Be it a message as simple as to go out and vote, or as opinionated as to support women’s rights, influencers tend to have a great impact on the audience. With social media monitoring, you can select the best fit for your political campaign by targeting the right keywords for different platforms.

Must read: How to make use of social listening for effective influencer marketing

#6 Analyzes Trending Hashtags

The use of hashtags is a must if you’re promoting your political party using social media. They take you to the subconscious of the world wide web. However, what’s even more important is learning the art of hashtag analysis.

Analyzing hashtags the voters use can provide you insightful findings. Firstly, you can recognize the stand of the majority of the population. Furthermore, it allows you to identify even minor changes in the interests of the voters.

Must Read: 4 ways to enhance your Instagram hashtag strategy

Next, it helps you in measuring the health of your political campaign. Using a social media listening tool, you can immediately track the mentions of users and know the conversations going around. Once you know what is trending, you can shape your speeches and political advertisements around it.

Source: Twitter

#7 Recognizes the Strongest Discourse Area

The more actionable data you get during the campaigning, the bigger improvement steps you can take to strengthen it. Social media monitoring can help you with it.

As known, converting the undecided voters to your voter bank is the hardest battle. If you know the locations where people are responding negatively to your political campaign, won’t it be easier to target them with specific details? With the help of conversation mapping, you can see the states where your favored candidate is being discussed in a good light. As a result, you can use the same strategy for the states where your party or a candidate is being shunned. Also, you can divert a majority of your campaign capital into the areas that are showing acceptance.

How Can Mentionlytics Help You With Political Campaigns?

Mentionlytics, an award-winning social media monitoring tool, can help you leverage social media insights for your political campaign. The easy interface of our tool makes you understand the analytics in a seamless manner. This gains you an advantage in recognizing the behavior of the voter at a granular level. Your decision-making process gets smoother, leading you towards a successful campaign.

Here’s how you can use the social media monitoring tool with Mentionlytics –

• Analyze your web and social media mentions with the assistance of our AI Analysis.
• Get exhaustive insights in simplified versions of pie charts, line graphs, and bar charts.
• Take the advice of our team on the ways you can pursue your insights and take action.
• Get your performance assessed regularly to improve your strategy.
• Identify negative connotations attached to your image and create a strategy for reputation improvement.
• Detect risks in advance and take appropriate action in advance.

Mentionlytics is one of the most powerful monitoring solutions. Our tool keeps getting evolved to be in sync with the dynamic environment and delivers the most relevant results.

We hope this guide on using social media monitoring tools for political campaigns was useful to you. For more such content, stay in touch with our platform.

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: www.mentionlytics.com/blog/political-campaigns-media-monitoring