Presidential Campaign and Social Media

Posted on by Mengmeng Tang

In the age of new media, politicians start to realize the importance of “being connected” and try to actively use social media in their political campaigns in order to “tweet their way into office”. Today, the use of social media in presidential election campaigns is very normal and critical.

People will always remember something when it repeatedly shows up. Your presence on social media automatically makes you part of the media agenda. The most famous line to explain agenda setting theory is “the press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” [1] Agenda setting theory was originally used to examine presidential election campaigns and researchers found that there was a strong correlation between the amount of media coverage and the strength of audience attitudes. In other words, the more you appear on media, the more likely people will talk about you. The presidential candidate’s presence on social media does not have to be 100% positive. However, all you have to do is to get people to think about you and talk about you. Take Donald Trump as an example, he has 3.1 million followers on Twitter, and there were about 6.4 million interactions regarding the launch of his campaign generated within 24 hours, compared with Jeb Bush’s 849,000 interactions. [2] Having a presence on various social media platforms is also important, and it also takes time to evaluate and select which platform is the most optimal. Hillary Clinton didn’t really realize this when she ran for president in 2008. However, “Hillary 2.0” appears as a digital savvy with the help of her social media team. In order to reach out to millennial voters, she pushes her political campaign to various millennial media, such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Periscope. Her presence on such media even earned her the name “The first teen POTUS”. [3]

However, not all of the stories get to the public equally. Presidential candidates should establish a healthy and reciprocal relationship with the media in order to get their stories featured and highlighted. According to gatekeeping theory, media does not reflect the reality, whereas it shapes the reality by filtering various sources of information. Even though social media is quite a “democratic” environment and is known for its “user-generated content” feature, there are still gatekeepers in the mechanism to decide which message gets more exposure to the public than others. Twitter Moments is a great example. Hillary Clinton got featured on Twitter Moments for her campaign with Katy Perry on Oct. 24th. She also got featured on Twitter Moments on Oct. 26th for her 68th birthday. Here, Twitter Moments functions as spotlight, which constantly “selects” content for social media users and draws people’s attention to Hillary’s campaign. Thus, candidates need to maintain good relationships with social media in order to stand out from tons of information on the Internet.

Sources:

[1]:https://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20Clusters/Mass%20Media/Agenda-Setting_Theory/

[2]: http://www.digitalbinx.com/donald-trump-pushes-campaign-social-media/

[3]: http://www.thewrap.com/how-hillary-clinton-found-her-social-media-mojo/

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