Social media has become an important part of marketing business strategy. We can check the hypothesis that social media benefits an election outcome in a positive way. However, we are not doing this today. We know that it does so. This post will tell you how some popular elections were won using this powerful tools of 21st century. After all, social media is where change happens.
Obama: The President made two histories
One is known by all. He is the first African American who was elected the president of the USA. The election of 2012 was also popular. In the election of 2012, 30% of users on social media said that they were motivated by families and friends on social media.
Big data mining played a crucial role in Obama’s campaign. After all it is easy to get professionals who can tell you which group is more likely to vote for you and donate to you. It is not the use that counts it is the smart use of social media that played a major role. The New York times summarizes it all.
Modi: India’s first social media election
Mr. Narender Modi when sworn as the prime minister of India was the second most liked person on Facebook. If Forbes had made a list of most followed world leaders on Twitter then he would have been in 6th position. BJP was the biggest beneficiary of young voters in the election. UN report says India has the largest number of young people. If you want to target 356 million people, then which way is better than social media? Young people in India were talking about change and BJP’s marketing experts knew that. Narender Modi himself used Twitter and talked about corruption, jobs and security. According to the IAMAI report “Social Media in India – 2013” social media in urban areas increased 91 million from 78 million by the end of 2013. Many twitter accounts were created to support Modi including his own account.
Twitter.com/narendramodi
Twitter.com/NaMo4PM
Twitter.com/narendramodiH
Twitter.com/isupportnamo
Slogans like “Janta Maaf Nahi Karege”, “Ache Din Anne Wale hai” became viral on social media as well and “Ab ki Baar Modi Sarkar“ became a tag line of BJP.
This is current statistics of Narender Modi on Social Media (As on 2 December 2015):
Twitter: 16.3 Million Followers
Facebook : 31,156,905 Likes
Youtube: 301,654 Subscribers
Google Plus : 2,982,677 Followers
Above data prove that BJP successfully reached millions of people from just a single text. They did it consistently until they grabbed 282 or 51.9% of all seats.
What Canadians talked about
Facebook launched “Voter Megaphone” to remind audience from Canada that they can vote today. After casting a vote, users could share the news on Facebook motivating his/her friends to do the same. According to CTVnews, liberal leader Justin Trudeau had the largest proportion of mentions. You can see shares of leader mentions by Twitter handle.
Use of videos on social media by Mr. Justin Trudeau played a major role. He created short and to the point videos which were easy to share and watch.
On Facebook too, he was a trend setter for other politicians in social media. Solvoguru can give credit to his quality of interaction and frequency of interaction Mr. Justin took 60 seconds challenge to present himself as an individual.
Katie Jeanes says he used 5 ways to take what you can, give nothing back on social media. These are video marketing, connection, humor, family and response. яндекс
Exemplary use of social media by these three parties/leaders paved the way how new elections will be won in coming time. It is evident that all of the strategies used were well planned and executed months before the D-day.