While the pandemic might have overshadowed what would have otherwise been wall-to-wall coverage of the presidential race, there’s still going to be an election in a few months, which means it’s time for ListenFirst to break out its analytics and share insights about what type of social media posts are most effective for each presidential candidates. With Kanye West now having entered the fray, here’s what social media strategy is working best for each of the presidential candidates since Kanye’s July 4th announcement.
Abortion Appears To Be The Campaign Issue Most Associated With Kanye West
Between July 4 – August 11, 2020 there were 143,896 Tweets mentioning both Kanye and Abortion; though sentiment around those Tweets was 44% Negative, compared to 4% Positive. Kanye had talked at a campaign rally about how they had considered aborting his now 7-year-old daughter, and how upsetting that is to him. For every Tweet praising his Pro-Life stance, there were a lot more saying things like “kanye saying abortion isn’t natural whilst having two surrogate babies is hilarious to me.”
While Kanye’s Pro-Life message is generating more negative than positive feedback, there’s still an audience that his feelings about abortion are connecting with, and as a third-party candidate; focusing on Pro-Life messaging might be his best chance on becoming a greater part of the national conversation.
President Trump Posts Short, All Caps Tweets Because They Generate The Most Responses
President Trump’s Tweets tend to perform the best in slogan form. For instance between July 4 – August 11, 2020; 4 of the top 10 best performing Tweets by Donald Trump said “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” and only that; with those Tweets averaging 645,662 responses. Overall, 9 of the 10 President Trump Tweets that generated the most responses in that time period were just one sentence long with “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” generating 688,231 responses and only containing three words.
During the same time period and in keeping with that less is more strategy, his top performing post on Instagram which generated 1,658,587 responses was a captionless picture of him posing with Goya products at the White House.
‘Not Trump’ Tweets Are Performing The Best For Biden
Generating 848,461 responses, the top performing Tweet for Joe Biden between July 4 – August 11 said “You won’t have to worry about my tweets when I’m president”. Other top performing posts included a Tweet that generated 404,892 responses saying we can’t let Donald Trump open up the Grand Canyon for uranium mining and a Tweet saying President Trump is ignoring the President Obama playbook for fighting pandemic which generated 404,702 responses. In comparison, the Tweet announcing Kamala Harris as his VP choice that didn’t mention Trump received 391,399 responses. It appears framing his Tweets as a critique of President Trump is his most effective strategy.
Conclusion:
Just like in any other type of social media marketing; connecting with the audience around political campaigns requires having social media analytics to understand what messaging is most resonant. ListenFirst provides the insights necessary for that winning social media strategy.
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