Does this bring in money or votes? Newsletter 31
Hi everyone! I’m Alicia Oken, the Social Media Platforms Director here at the DNC. I’m excited to share more about all of the social media accounts we run to reach over 110 million followers.
Background
A 2022 Pew Research poll found that half of American adults get at least some of their news from social media, with Facebook and YouTube outpacing other platforms. This shows the massive opportunity Democrats have to directly reach people where they’re spending most of their time.
In addition to @TheDemocrats, our team posts on the political social media accounts of President @JoeBiden, Vice President @KamalaHarris, and Second Gentleman @DouglasEmhoff. Our portfolio includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat—and the DNC’s video team manages our TikTok, Giphy, and YouTube accounts.
On any given day, we can reach an audience of more than 110 million people online with our message—making the accounts we manage one of the world’s biggest megaphones for Democratic messaging.
And that megaphone is growing! Since I started at the DNC in 2021, our organic social media accounts have driven over 8 billion impressions, 921 million video views, and a 120% increase in our audience.
To put that in context -if you were going to run a paid digital ads program on these social platforms to drive that many impressions, it’d cost roughly $62 million. Here’s how we do it:
Principal Accounts aka @JoeBiden, @KamalaHarris, and @DouglasEmhoff
The sheer scope of these accounts means that the content we post regularly drives the conversation online. One of our key metrics is whether or not we’re able to break into the top political posts of the day for each social media platform. In October, posts from @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris accounts were in the top 5 politics-related Instagram posts over a dozen times. Here are some of those posts:
It’s also critically important we ensure that all the accounts we manage are collaborating with each other. We often post videos natively on @TheDemocrats’ Twitter account and embed it on @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris’ Twitter accounts to centralize our view count, and give @TheDemocrats account a boost—plus, it ensures we’re getting the most out of each video we produce.
President Biden
People love seeing President Biden sticking up for working families and fighting back against extreme MAGA Republicans. It’s no surprise that some of our best performing content for the @JoeBiden social media accounts are opposition and contrast posts—graphic, video, and text posts that call out the GOP’s agenda.
We’ve also discovered after a series of tests that these posts tend to pop when we publish them later at night:
Vice President Harris
Only 31% of Americans often get their news from TV. That means it’s my team’s job to harness social media to get Biden-Harris interviews and speeches in front of as many eyes as possible. We do this by repurposing TV clips and optimizing them for each social platform we run.
A clip of Vice President Harris’ appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers discussing how the Biden-Harris administration is urging governors and states to pardon people who have been convicted for simple possession of marijuana gained over 4.6 million video views on Instagram. According to Nielsen, Late Night with Seth Meyers has about 1 million total viewers. Now that is the power of social media!
We’ve also found after testing that nice photos of the vice president with policy-related text tend to overperform. Draw the user in with a nice photo, and leave them more informed about Biden-Harris administration successes they can then share with their followers, family, and friends.
@TheDemocrats Accounts
@TheDemocrats social accounts are used to hype up Democrats running for office, draw contrast with the Republican Party, and spread the word about key Biden-Harris administration accomplishments. We also use our accounts to experiment and try to find new learnings to help us reach more people—everything from A/B testing copy to launching a TikTok account.
We work hand in hand with our design, video, and rapid response teams to share eye-catching graphics and videos that are accessible and optimized specifically for each social media platform. What works on Facebook might not work on Twitter and so forth.
Optimization and iteration are core tenets of our work. If a plain-text tweet overperformed on Twitter, we quickly take that finding and develop more concepts—can we publish a captioned clip? How about a compelling graphic?
For example, we took a clip of a speech from the vice president that overperformed and turned it into a beautiful share graphic.
Core Themes
Since January of 2021, the top-performing social media content for the DNC social accounts have fallen into a few core buckets:
Biden-Harris wins
Economic news
Republican contrast
Campaign Coordination
Our social media and video teams spearheaded a project to collaborate with top campaigns of the 2022 cycle. Senate and gubernatorial campaigns across the country sent us video, photo, and design assets to work with, and we used these to create content for @TheDemocrats’ social media accounts.
The end result is that the DNC social accounts uplifted these campaigns, all while creating new assets that the campaigns could amplify from their accounts—a win-win for everyone involved. This project was especially helpful for smaller campaigns that didn’t have large digital teams to create organic social media content.
To date, we’ve created and published more than 100 pieces of content for our social media accounts, driving nearly 4M impressions and 11.5M video, GIF, and sticker views.
In conclusion,
We are so grateful to DNC leadership for trusting the vision and seriously investing in organic social media. None of this massive growth and none of our learnings would exist without having the investment we’ve gotten—and having it early.
There are only a few weeks left until the Georgia runoff election, and we plan to keep pushing out content encouraging people to VOTE.
As I tell my team: stay hydrated, and I’ll see you online.
Alicia