Two Things The 2016 Election Candidates Should Look At

Posted on by Trong Nguyen

Recently, the 2016 Election has heated up with multiple debates and primary results. As seen clearly, social media plays an important role in this year’s Election, especially engaging public with timely updates, photos and videos. I, as a social media specialist, have two pieces of advice for this year’s candidates.

First, so as to deliver information timely and interact with the audience effectively, politicians should keep embedding videos into the 140-character message on Twitter. A video such as Hillary Clinton’s below can easily boost direct connection between candidate and voter, and also help minimize the power of fact checking. Also, the candidate can capture dialogues or a Q&A conference with voter via Twitter. By doing that, not only can they release the timely and relevant information but also get the audience involved. Furthermore, the videos can be virally retweeted, helping the candidates disseminate the messages. By and large, creating video message on Twitter is an ideal way to reach audience timely and enhance the trustworthiness of information.

Secondly, politicians should learn the edit test in social media, which is about the connection between platforms and audience. In fact, Facebook users is everyone, even we can find our grandmothers’ accounts on Facebook. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat is mostly used by millennials, whose preference is short messages, streaming and videos. Besides, each kind of audience accesses social media at different time, so politicians should do researches to understand this habit. By understanding that, politicians can plan the strategies to boost the contents timely on the right platforms. For example, Donald Trump wants to spread a memorable quote, he can post a photo with his quote on Twitter during the early morning time. It is because Twitter users are in the habit of reading short contents, and morning time is when users access Twitter to find contents and retweet.

In lights of the ideas outlined above, I conclude that social media are exposing many potential benefits, definitely contributing to the success of politicians in this 2016 presidential race

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