The Broadway Community’s Use of Social Media During the 2020 Election
The use of social media in the Obama campaign was a catalyst for hundreds of other political campaigns using various social media platforms to get information out to the public. Clay Shirky said that the Obama campaign made “really mature use” of social media by convening its supporters, but not controlling them. By doing so, they reinforced the idea that they weren’t trying to force a message onto the campaign’s supporters, but that they hoped that creating a community would aid their efforts.
The community aspect of political campaigns is one that has become critical over the past few years, in my opinion, and both official campaigns and grassroots organizations seem to be built on them.
A political organization that comes to mind, especially regarding the 2020 Presidential election, is the grassroots organization, Broadway for Biden. An entirely volunteer-run, entirely online organization, Broadway for Biden’s goal was to get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris elected in November 2020. The volunteers included current and former Broadway performers, directors, writers, and many other individuals from the theatre industry.
As an entirely online organization, Broadway for Biden turned to social media to connect with their target audience. Their primary platforms were Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. They did, however, collaborate with the Broadway Podcast Network, whose YouTube channel hosted events such as town halls and promoted the organization during their own programming. Along with the town halls, the organization also created content promoting Broadway for Biden phone banking events. There were also videos on topics such as the Biden-Harris platform, states’ laws regarding ballots, and why Broadway’s biggest stars were voting Biden.
The organization’s primary audience was young theatre fans, and they reached them via TikTok. The Broadway for Biden TikTok account has 138 posts (the account itself has gained 1.5 million likes across all videos posted), including some reposts from other theatre creators on the app who were not directly working with the organization. This is in comparison to the organization’s Instagram, which has 234 posts. Only a handful of those are videos that were cross-posted to TikTok. Using the app, the organization was able to connect young audiences with young Broadway stars, some of whom couldn’t even vote in the election! In the video below, Presley Ryan, who plays Lydia in Beetlejuice the Musical, explains how individuals under the age of eighteen could pledge to register to vote.
The TikTok account features not only young performers on Broadway, but also seasoned veterans. These individuals, however, are ones that have been in shows that are incredibly popular with young audiences. Actors from shows such as Wicked and Legally Blonde made videos for the organization’s account, giving their own reasons for voting, or parodying songs from shows they are known for.
In another video, Broadway performers Chris and Clay Rice-Thomson discuss how taking a picture with or of your ballot is illegal in some states and could cause your vote to become invalid. The comments of the video are filled with people saying that they didn’t know that it was illegal to do so. It wasn’t just first time voters, though, one of the commenters was a parent of a first time voter!
Performers from Hamilton, Mean Girls, Newsies, Dear Evan Hansen, Jagged Little Pill, Beetlejuice, and The Prom are some of the most frequent faces on the organization’s TikTok account. These shows are well-known for having large followings of teens and young adults and are shows about young people (save for Hamilton, which isn’t about young people for more than a few songs but has had a chokehold on throes of young theatre fans since it premiered in 2015). The captions of some of the videos even include tags like #theatrekid or #genz, aiming the content at teens and young adults. Broadway for Biden knew their target audience and was intentional in how they ran that branch of their social media campaign.
I think that Clay Shirky would consider the Broadway for Biden social media campaign to be a “mature” use of it. They knew what audiences used what platforms and catered to their interests and how much they may or may not have known about the election. On Facebook, they shared a lot of articles and infographics, while on Instagram, it was infographics and videos similar to those they posted on TikTok.
Broadway for Biden created a community through social media (and only social media) but used different platforms to do it. They were promoting the same communal events they were holding, but in various ways… ways that would appeal to specific audiences. They took multiple routes to reach one destination, and it worked.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASZJE15E0SY
