Major Impacts on Social Media this Election Year
Social media platforms are continuously making changes to their algorithms for one reason or another. During an election year, they take it to a whole new level, making our job in social media branding vastly more complicated. We need to be prepared as things heat up toward the election, and there are specific metrics that should be focused on.
Increased Competition
It is hard to browse any social media platform during an election season and avoid political noise. While your brand may have nothing to do with such content, it is still taking up precious space on users’ phones that could otherwise be filled with your brand. Some of this content is candidate promotion, news stories, or simply conversations surrounding candidates. The algorithms will favor this content not just because people want political content but also because that is the hot topic, and everyone is talking about it. Understanding this dimension of competition and ramping up your advertising strategy and budget will be crucial to avoid being drowned out.
Organic Performance will Decrease
As a result of this increase in political content comes the decrease in your performance. It is not just the political content you are competing with; other brands are going to ramp up their advertising budgets as well. This can make the battle feel impossible to win, but the data may be in your favor. Polls by the Pew Research Center show that
46% of social media users were already feeling drained by political posts on social media in 2019.
Intuitively you may be thinking, “doesn’t that mean there are fewer people to view my brand?”. The answer is yes, and no. Many of the people who are avoiding political content will be seeking alternatives, which is an enormous opportunity.
Ad Costs will Increase
Costs have steadily risen in the advertisement realm for as long as they have existed, and during the election season, this will only get worse. An increase in competition means an increase in demand, and the prices rise to capitalize on this event. Not only do you have this increase in price, but a decrease in audience size, which all sounds counter-intuitive.
What does this mean for you? It is time to re-evaluate your strategy not only within our social media platforms, but which platforms ought to be utilized. Within those platforms, how can you strategically target your regular audience and maybe even capitalize on some of the political audience? These are all broad-stroked questions that need to be fine-tuned for your brand and its goals, but nonetheless, crucial to combating the political wave.
Conclusion
The election year is probably going to feel like an uphill battle, and the fact of the matter is because it is an obstacle. Be that as it may, the first step in solving a problem is understanding it. Once you have a solid framework to operate with, then you can begin finding ideal solutions to combat it. Assessing your social media presence, increasing your marketing budget, and adjusting your strategy, all of these approaches will be invaluable in fighting back against the tsunami of political noise coming your way. Take advantage of these methods, and leverage them until the election year is finally over again.
