Do you want to crash your political opponents on social media? Less curation and more volume
Until not so long ago, Facebook was still the overall place where everybody could communicate to multiple audiences through a very powerful targeting system. Over the past few months though, the power of pages dropped significantly for a few reasons: the Facebook algorithm is going back to its original model where profiles (actual people) have a higher priority in timelines versus pages. Secondly, people, especially younger people, are moving away from Facebook and moving to Instagram, even though controversially, Facebook’s user basis has just constantly grown somehow 🤔.
For a politician the challenge is then “Where do you talk about policy”?
On Instagram? No. Instagram is a place where users don’t expect policy-related content. Certainly, it is a place to increase your brand overall but not to discuss policy.
Snapchat? Don’t even go there.
Linkedin? Sure, but not many voters are there and political content doesn’t score high on timelines.
Twitter? Sure, but not in depth.
Blog? Sure, but people still hardly consume content directly on Medium or Wordpress unless they are shared on other social networks.
Pretty much, the solution is “volume”. The maximization of volume you can reach on as many social networks as possible through one or a set of political events, debates or similar activities. Let me explain.
What do politicians do mostly? They give speeches, they attend debates, they go on TV or radio. Let’s say you are giving a 10 minutes speech.
Are there capacities to launch this speech live on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Instagram? If so, you already have four active platforms and related pieces of content.
It’s not live? Get the video file. With that you can publish the full speech on Facebook, Twitter, IGTV, Linkedin and YouTube. Plus you can cut out 2 or 3 shorter video bits, between 20 and 60 seconds, that can reposted as Facebook posts, Facebook stories, tweets, Insta stories, Linkedin posts and snaps. These video bits can be turned into visual quotes (best quality possible of the background photo) which can be published in al the above-mentioned places and through different times (not necessarily all at once). The video file can uploaded directly as a podcast on whatever platform you like be it Soundcloud, Anchor, Streaker or whatever. The podcast can then be reshared later on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.
Got photos from the event? Do everything you did with the video. Got the speech text? Publish it as a Facebook note, a blog on Medium, an article on Linkedin. Furthermore, how about a summary of the event? Maybe two or three paragraphs about what happened, who was there and the goal of the occasion.
Were other politicians or celebrities there? Ask for collabs. Take a photo with them, share them, tag them and ask to do the same. Like their posts and comment on them with a thank you message or do a snap video asking them a question and post it cross-platform.
Sounds like a lot of work, right? But in a few lines I have showed you how you can create basically over 50 pieces of content off just one event. Do that daily and see how much volume you can create. This is where an ambitious communicator needs to go. Less curation, more volume. Execute, execute and execute daily. This is the recipe for seriously growing a digital brand today in politics. There is no shortcut.
I believe in the power of good ideas but in the digital communication battle field today I would not sacrifice volume accuracy or daily massive execution over one potentially excellent idea.
