Want to win the Election? Make sure you’ve got a strong social media communications campaign….

A Daily Telegraph article which explores the rising importance of social media for grassroot democracy activism in China, prompted me to write this posting.

The popularity of Twitter-like microblogs and internet chat forums has made it harder for the Party to control the system  with  more than 100 “independent” candidates standing for local elections in China.

Social media tools have been increasingly influential in election campaigns elsewhere.  The US presidential and UK General Election are two of the most recent examples of the impact of social media on large-scale campaigns. Obama’s presidential campaign was one of the biggest success stories in this regard with his social media programme driving more than 5 million new supporters, 8.5 million visitors to his website and 80 million YouTube views.

Last year the UK witnessed its first general election in the social media age with almost half of the population turning to the Internet for information about the parties and candidates.  A study of the elections revealed that 97% of the polled participants used Facebook during the election and the majority of 18-24 year olds preferred online media as their primary source of information.

Furthermore the social media space was inundated with comments and tweets providing real-time opinion and information about the progress of the election campaign. The immediacy of the social media ‘coverage’ could not be matched even by good old TV, with Twitter and online forums quickly becoming the harbinger of public opinion trends.

The recent experience clearly shows that social media is no longer a nice to have addition to political campaigns but a must-have tool which should be integrated into the overall communication strategies. The strength of the online medium is that it enables different levels of engagement with the audiences, i.e. on personal, social and political level.

It will be interesting to see how social media usage in election campaigns will evolve with the development of new technologies. In upcoming elections campaigners will be able to use mobile apps, geolocation tools and users’ data to tailor political messages to smaller areas while encouraging people to engage in interactive conversations on the go.

The ‘personalisation’ of political messages will be further enhanced by a deeper interaction between traditional and social media, empowering people to take active role in the political ‘conversation’.