The primaries in Pennsylvania were hard fought, especially the 11th district, where one of our clients, Bill Vinsko, happened to be running. In the end, his opponent came out on top, but I wanted to point out the real impact social media can have on an election day.
It is amazing to see the activity that happens on an important day like April 24, 2012. This is where politicians should always have their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the media, public, and competition….in comes social media monitoring and real time updates.
Let’s take a look at the two channels we used to monitor and participate:
With a community of around 625 supporters on Vinsko’s Facebook page, we planned to share pictures at every stop on the campaign trail. The community reacted well, as you may know that pictures on Facebook generally receive the most amount of engagement. Here is a picture of Bill voting with his wife Paula.
Another planned piece of media was real time video updates at major points in the 11th district. As you can see below Bill has a great presence on camera, and it gave some life to the election day activities.
The real time nature of Twitter is a great asset to a campaign team. We were always on top of the latest news and commentary from the media, community, supporters, and opposition.
As you can imagine, we were kept busy with all the activity happening literally every second. We could also report back to Vinsko and his field team on when to expect an increase in voter turnout due to monitoring keywords that signified voting intent.
To give you a sense of what this feed looked liked, here is a screenshot from our Hootsuite dashboard:
To the General Election…
We’ll continue to oversee activity leading up to the big enchilada, and it should prove to be just as thought provoking and pretty darn fun if you’d ask me! Good luck to the remaining candidates.
Did you see politicians shining in the social media space during the primary season? If so, let us know in the comments below. We love case studies!
