Yesterday’s election had social media buzzing, with countless political posts occurring every minute. Many marketers, I’m sure, wish there was this much activity on social media all year round. People were posting opinions, reading others, and debating all night, especially after the re-election of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America. However, it was not only the average, everyday internet users that were blowing up news feeds and posting like crazy. There were brands using the election for posts, there were politicians debating one another on Twitter, but possibly the most important posts were coming from the candidates themselves.
Not only did Barack Obama’s victory post on Facebook break some sort of record for amount of Likes on a single post, it showed us something about the prominence of different social media websites and networks in today’s society. This could ultimately tell marketers which networks they should pay most attention to.
How do the president’s victory posts have anything to do with the importance of social media networks? Well, it was not so much the content of the president’s posts as it was where he posted them.
As everyone probably saw, Barack Obama posted a picture of himself and the first lady embracing in celebration of his re-election on Facebook, with a message reading, “Four more years.” This, he probably assumed would reach the majority of his supporters. He posted a very similar post on Twitter, with the image and the message showing the same. This became the most tweeted Tweet in the network’s history. Clearly, a lot of Twitter users are fans of our president. Along with these posts, a different image was posted on Barack Obama’s Tumblr page, showing him touching fists with another man inside the White House with the same message as the posts above.
Barack was clearly trying to reach his supporters in places that proved to him to be the most populated by internet users. The significant fact here is that upon being re-elected, Obama made no changes to his Google+ account, which still shows him telling followers to vote. Furthermore, there was no announcement or celebration on the president’s Instagram page, nor on his Pinterest page. It seems the president did not feel that these networks were worth the post.
As we all can tell in the months before the election, these candidates and their campaigners do a lot of research into the hottest marketing trends, especially in social media marketing. They seem to know where things should go and how to get political ads seen. So, if the president did not post to these networks and nobody else did for him, what does it mean for these networks? I suppose that what I’m trying to say is this; If the President of the U.S.A, a man who needs to reach as many people as he possibly can, did not post anything to these networks upon winning the election, how valuable can they really be in the marketing world? It is something that puts a perspective into the social media importance levels even though you would never expect it to.
