New Website Setup for Voter Gravity Clients

Written by John Stevenot
on September 21, 2015
in Blog

In today’s digital age it’s more important than ever to have a place for people to learn about you and your campaign online. This seems like a pretty obvious statement, but here’s where the problems start piling on.

Do you have a web designer? Do you have an easy way to add content using a system similar to a word processor? Does the website use the most up-to-date security features? Does your website work on desktop, tablet, and mobile?

Seems like a lot to think about, right? That’s just scratching the surface. There is an immense amount of work that goes into creating an effective website for your campaign including, but not limited to, integrations with third party applications. We have decided to help you solve these problems. Continue reading →

37 Tweet Ideas for the Political Candidate

Written by Isabelle Schuler
on November 22, 2013
in Blog

Maybe your political campaign is keeping you so busy you’re struggling to find time to keep up with your role in social media. You’ve just hit a wall and are having a difficult time generating content. Chances are, you may be over-thinking it.

The great (and maybe not so great) thing about Twitter is that pretty much anything goes. Not every single tweet needs to push your campaign forward in an obvious way. The whole point of Twitter for the political candidate is to enable you to connect with more people. But unless you’re personal, it will be just as hard to connect online as it is in person. So unless your post is wildly offensive or inappropriate, it’s fine to post. That being said, there are ways to fail at Twitter, so make sure that your tweets aren’t hurting your cause.

If you’re still struggling to generate content, here is a list of what to tweet:

Infographics
Inspirational Quotes
“Today in History” facts
Radio and TV interviews
Occasional links to your donate page
Opportunities to volunteer for your campaign
Commentary on national and local news
Shout-outs to friends, volunteers, and colleagues
Links to your blog
Links to your website
Retweets
Replies to people who mention you
Political events you’re hosting
Pictures of your family
Comment on current events
Questions to followers
Platform points
Pictures of your volunteers
Local events that you’ll be attending
Relevant articles
Pictures of you
Fun/interesting statistics
Political events occurring in the area
Pictures of your hometown
Local business highlights
The benefits of living in your town
What you’d change to make “home” a better place to live
Shout out to campaign volunteers
Thank local businesses for their support
Breaking news
Press releases
YouTube clips
How-to’s
Trending topics, if relevant (complete with hashtags)
Vine videos
Links to pictures on your Instagram
Fun facts about your town/state

Connecting More Powerfully with Your Digital Campaign

Written by Isabelle Schuler
on October 29, 2013
in Blog

If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you’ve noticed our strong emphasis on the importance of being where your voters are – whether at their front door or on their favorite social networking sites. We think it’s important to combine a solid offline campaign with a complementary online, or digital, campaign. Here are our top three reasons why:

1) The numbers speak for themselves.

Total number of month active Facebook users: 1,110,000,000
Total number of mobile Facebook users: 680,000,000
Total number of minutes spent on Facebook each month: 700 billion
Average time spent on Facebook per visit: 20 minutes

Continue reading →

9 Ways to Track Your Social Media Success

Written by Aubrey Blankenship
on October 10, 2013
in Blog

At Voter Gravity we’re interested in the data, analytics, and science that goes into empowering a political campaign. But we’ve been there. Running a campaign takes time. And now you have a digital campaign to keep up with. Trying to keep track of who’s following you, which posts have the most influence, what times are best to post, etc. can be overwhelming. Thankfully, many have come before you and devised simpler methods and tools for tracking the success of your social media campaigns.

Here are some awesome sites that we think will be useful in saving you time as you track your social media success and allow your digital campaign to play an important role in data-driven voter contact. Always allow the data to inform your digital strategies. Note: As a political candidate, always keep in mind that most tools used for managing company accounts will also work in managing your personal accounts.

General:

Google Analytics is a comprehensive tool that allows you to track visitors coming to your site. This tool enhances your voter contact efforts as it allows you to see where they’re from, where they go when they leave your site, whether they make a donation, etc. We stumbled upon this handy set of guides earlier today.

Social Eye allows you to manage, schedule, approve, publish and moderate your social media posts on Twitter, Facebook and anywhere else you may be posting on a regular basis. Social Eye allows you to perform a few neat tricks to optimize posting. For example, you can set specific times for when you want to post, allowing you to send out content when people are actually online rather than when your team is in the office.

Wildfire is actually an app powered by Google Analytics. This handy tool allows you to measure social ROI; everything from revenue on ads to donations can be measured by this little guy. This is an example of an analytics tool that is sold to businesses but will work well for campaigns as well.

Facebook:

Booshaka is technically a marketing platform, but this still falls into your aim to market yourself for a position of leadership. Booshaka provides features that help you understand your social media community engagement in order to develop social marketing strategies, and engage with your community in order to increase your awareness of your fan/followers base.

Quintly is geared more specifically towards analyzing Facebook content and interactions, then uses those measurements to provide metrics from which you can adjust your campaign. These metrics specifically help in user interaction and finding the perfect time to post your specific content.

Facebook Insights are a feature of every Facebook page. Our basic message to you is: use them! Our favorite features include details about when your fans are online and the success of different post types based on average reach.

Twitter:

Twitonomy is an analytics tool with both free and premium versions. Premium features include search analytics, custom date ranges and even downloading data into Excel or PDF. Twitonomy provides you with a wide range of analytics including tweets per day, who you retweet most often, which of your tweets were retweeted the most, which were favorited the most and much more.

Followerwonk is a free product that allows you to grow your twitter account through very specific features tailored to increase the effectiveness of your account. Bio search research is good for exploring the twitter user graph of twitter. This is especially good for outreach. You can also compare users. When you plug in the names of other users on Twitter, you are provided with a Venn Diagram comparing followers, tweets, and anything else that you may want to know about other users out there.

TweetDeck brings clarity to the mess of tweets that your twitter feed would be without organization. It’s considered a staple by many Twitter users. TweetDeck can help you distinguish between tweets from specific users, direct messages, replies, and the rest of the Twitter world. This will be helpful in untangling the constant feed of information.

Bonus: And, just for fun, compare yourself to a friend (or opponent) on Visual.ly. Political analytics doesn’t have to be boring after all.

3 Social Media Tips for the Political Candidate

Written by Isabelle Schuler
on October 4, 2013
in Blog

By now, you’ve realized that if you don’t have an online presence your campaign is in serious trouble. This year, smartphone users have expanded to include 67% of the U.S. population. An incomprehensible amount of information is at the fingertips of the three out of four Americans who own a computer.

The stats say it all: the Internet has become the biggest forum for discussion available. With an online presence you could be a powerful part of that discussion. Without a strong presence you’re going to be left behind. Here are three social media tips that you, as a candidate, can apply to lay the foundation for a killer online digital campaign:

Publish often. And enjoy it.

This can be the time to really enjoy getting involved in the discussion. Almost everyone with a strong opinion will want to express it. If you let your accounts lag behind, you’re sending out an image that you can’t keep up. If, however, you step up to the plate, you’ll prove that you can keep up with the trends while pushing your ideas forward. People will want to follow someone who can keep up. It’s a win-win for everyone!

Here’s the key: select at least one person to drive your social media campaign. The intern who publishes whatever you shoot to him or her isn’t going to cut it. While you should produce original content as much as you can, appoint a digital specialist early on in the campaign.

Post with purpose.

In order to become a powerful part of the conversation (and truly augment your offline campaign), make sure you’re touching on the issues people care about – and are already talking about – instead of a copy/paste from your to-do list. Yes, tweet links to press releases and endorsements, as well as updates on your campaign website and blogs, but don’t stop there. Comment on national and local news, and include pictures of your events, yourself, and your supporters.

Get ideas from other candidates who are doing a good job online. On many popular accounts, you’ll see replies, retweets, mentions, hashtags, and shout-outs. Remember that being relevant always means involving your audience. On Twitter, follow other accounts. Don’t even be “that guy” who prides himself in Twitter account with 10,000 followers while he follows none. He’s missed the point of social media. Pursue engagement and invite feedback.

Check your work.

There is no magic formula to a successful social media campaign. But there are formulas that you’ll discover work for you. Know your data and make sure that you’re doing the right work. For instance, posts tend to be shared and liked more on weekends than throughout the week. Blogs, on the other hand, often have the most viewers early in the morning. Always know what’s working and what’s not working. Use a program that tracks your reach (such as BufferApp.com or ManageFlitter.com).

Staying on top of analytics will help you know who’s following what, the posts that people are actually reading, pages that your audience clicks through on your site, keywords that they respond to, etc. With this information you will be able to tailor the words that you use and the information that you put out in order to reach as many people as possible, resulting in new supporters.

Digital Campaigning: Capture Your Audience in Eight Seconds Flat

Written by Isabelle Schuler
on September 19, 2013
in Blog

Ten years ago you had 12 minute attention spans to work with in attracting voters online. Today, you have 8 seconds. Whether we like it or not, social media is the new currency, and unless we adjust accordingly, we’ll be broke.

If you’ve already made adjustments and have an online presence, then you’re doing much better than many of your colleagues. But having a web presence alone was cutting edge in the ’90s. Welcome to 2013.

With the competition from the Left and the advancements in digital campaigning and political technology, including data-driven analytics, testing, and optimization, it’s not enough to simply exist online.

Gain an edge by utilizing the latest technology – offline by turning data into votes on the ground – and online using tools and digital strategies to capture the attention of your voters and empower your offline campaign.

Here are five practical guidelines to grabbing attention and keeping it:

1. Position your important information strategically
The average page visit lasts a little less than a minute, so make sure that your viewer’s eye is drawn to the most crucial part of your campaign from the moment he or she access the site. For example, if your mission statement is what you think will empower supporters, place it in large text at the top. And as always, test it out. Is your important information placed strategically? Use online tools such as Usability Hub’s Five Second Test, which gives users the ability to test sections of their site against a random audience.

2. Avoid clutter
Everyone is tempted to put all their information on that first page, but don’t do it. Rather than overwhelm your audience with cluttered content, simplify your home page and make it interesting enough so that people will want to click through to your more meaty platform. Today, with the dominance of technology and social media in every sphere, including politics, it is well worth the time and funds to hire a professional web designer. This will ensure that your layout highlights the important information without losing anything crucial and keeps the reader on your website.

3. Ensure that your website is running properly
This may seem simple, studies show that if a website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40% of users will abandon the page. The faster your site loads the better your chances that people will actually read your website, let alone click through it. There are online tools that you can download to ensure your website reaches its maximum viewing potential.

4. Connect to your other social media networks
Online campaigning doesn’t stop with the website. Facebook is a must for the modern campaign. We think Twitter is too. Think of social networks as different social functions. The more events you go to, the more people you meet, and the more you get the word out, the more reach you will have for your ideas. A website is the perfect place to advertise your presence on other social networks. Use it to interact with your audience and broadened your reach.

5. Analyze and improve
Here at Voter Gravity we live and breath data and analytics. Never implement a suggestion without testing and analyzing if it actually works for you. Only by looking back and determining who has visited your site, clicked through links, commented on posts, used certain search terms, etc. can you craft your digital strategy into something truly successful. If the numbers don’t add up, then make improvements. Google Analytics recently released a report about how the Obama 2012 campaign took advantage of Google Analytic tools to gain an upper edge: “Having quick and easy access to actionable data was essential for President Obama’s data-driven re-election campaign in 2012…. Early on, they turned to Google Analytics to help the web, email, and ads teams understand what motivated new supporters to become more vocal advocates and regular donors over time. The team tested various secondary calls-to-action after a visitor’s initial signup or donation to encourage further involvement with the campaign.” Check out the full case study here.

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