When it comes to political messaging, nothing can be truer than the adage: Know your audience.
Before we get started, let’s remember the Bell Curve as it pertains to politics. Roughly twenty percent are harder left-leaning and twenty percent are harder right-leaning. Do you know what else is twenty percent? The approximate number of U.S. citizens on Twitter. Twitter is not reality in American politics. And Twitter is certainly NOT your district.
So many aspiring candidates think they can go to social media and post their agenda or their stance on larger “hot” topics such as gun control, immigration, free college tuitions and such and think that they will win favor. And this will probably be your second mistake. Your first is not hiring a digital marketing team to keep you from making this mistake, but more on that in a moment. Back to the topic at hand.
So, it all sounds great that you’re all for gun rights (as an example). You go to Twitter and you proudly post that you will defend the Second Amendment “at all costs”. A few days later you have a couple of hundred likes, a few re-tweets, and a handful of comments and you’re feeling good about yourself. You’ve got some courage and you prepare to fire off another incendiary post.
Now if you’re running for office in a “red” district, good for you. You’ve probably won some supporters. But what if you’re in a “purple” district? Or worse, what if you’re running in a “blue” district? If the latter two are the case, you’ve played a short game of posting to get followers, rather than messaging for the long game.
Stop for a moment and look at who responded. Most of those responding won’t be from your district and can’t vote for you (some won’t even be from this country). Many of the incendiary responses will be bots programmed to elicit a response from you or those responding to your post. But more importantly, you’ve given ammunition to your opponents who will use this against you as your race heats up.
Before you begin your messaging, you need to know what moves the people in your district, not what Twittersphere wants to hear. If no one in your district cares about guns, why are you talking about it?
At Reach Voters, our in-house team has decades of experience in political strategy and effective, targeted messaging to provide our clients with optimal and measurable results with proven success.
We tell your story in an authentic way to help you stand out from the rest. We create a multi-platform strategy to get your message in front of voters, not bots in other countries.
Contact Reach Voters today to schedule an interview to see if we can help you succeed.
