Does this bring in money or votes? Newsletter 22
Hello everybody! We’re Emily Keller, the DNC Social Media Director, and Rebecca Kwon, DNC Social Content Associate. This year we shifted our social program’s goals for GOTV, prioritizing one-on-one conversations with voters and working to meet voters where they are. By focusing almost entirely on voter education, we were able to help voters get the information they needed, without sacrificing our accounts’ followers, reach, or engagement (all three actually increased!!!).
Let’s talk about how we did it:
Feature:
Autoreplies 📲
Working closely with our friends at the convention, we saw the tremendous success they had running a Twitter autoreply program reminding users to tune in. Users interacted with a tweet and were opted in to receive replies from the convention’s account. We wanted to know: could we use this tool to help voters vote? We wanted to be more specific than a generic national campaign, so we also worked to set up an opt-in path for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Then we set out drafting the content — we needed state-specific dates, deadlines, and rules to share with voters. With the help of state voter protection directors and the team at Biden for President, we drafted 416 tweets to remind voters about everything from registration to polling hours on Election Day. The result was pushing voting reminders right into a user’s @ mentions: over the course of October we had over 15,000 individual conversations with voters, and those tweets had a click-through rate 6 times higher than our average.
Voter Education for GOTV 🗳️
But we knew we couldn’t just wait for voters to come to us — we had to go to them. That’s why we began searching for voters who were using Twitter to find voting information so we could give them the resources they needed to cast their ballot. From broader search queries for voters who asked “how do I vote?” and “where do I vote?” to more tailored searches for voters who had questions specific to their state or circumstance, we left no stone unturned. We found several voters who wanted to vote early, but had no idea how, voters who didn’t know how to find their polling location, voters who required accommodations at the polls but didn’t know how to seek assistance, and voters who wanted to know if they could vote in person if they hadn’t received their ballot in the mail. We were able to be a resource to them by directing them to their state’s voting page on IWillVote.com or the DNC’s voter assistance hotline.
By essentially turning our account into the voting edition of an airline’s customer service team, we were able to directly follow up and answer the questions of hundreds of voters. By Election Day, we had talked to over 800 voters individually on Twitter, and had a 54% response rate
Vote Tripling
We were helping voters vote, but why stop there? We knew our reach and impact didn’t have to stop at a single conversation. So we set out with a simple ask for voters — “Can you remind 3 of your friends to vote too?” We looked for voters who finished exercising their right to vote by looking for ‘I Voted’ selfies on Twitter and Instagram. We found plenty of these tagged under the hashtags #IVoted, #EarlyVoter, #IVotedBidenHarris2020, and in many other variations of these hashtags.
After Instagram began hiding hashtags in searches, we got creative — looking for voters who had tagged @JoeBiden or had used “I Voted” as the photo location. And our efforts to find these voters proved worthwhile: We commented on over 1,800 posts, had a 67% response rate, and had our best week for Instagram audience growth ever.
Job opportunities:
We have a lot of great folks across the BFP digital and DNC mobilization teams looking for their next job. Take a look!
🧵Thread we think you should read (and retweet) 🧵
Closing:
For the voter mobilization portion of this election cycle, we prioritized individual conversations with voters over the content on our timeline. And it paid off: Not only were we able to better help voters and give them more tailored information, but by going to search for voters ourselves, we saw an increase in followers, reach, and engagement on all of our content.
If you reach out to voters, answer their questions, and meet them where they are, your audience will respond.
Thanks for reading!
Emily (@egkeller) & Rebecca (@kwon_beccs)