A month after Election Day, we highlight some of the best social sharing strategies advocacy groups, campaigns, and businesses alike should adopt from this past election cycle.
Images Credit: Gage Skidmore
It’s been a month since Election Day and experts across the communications and marketing fields are still gleaning critical insights.
Not only do the results of the Presidential election propose a new reality for how political and advocacy campaigns are conducted, but also implications on the efficacy of digital advertising and social media engagement across public and private sector organizations.
We at SoSha have been working to provide both an analysis of some of the pain points many organizations faced this past election cycle, and highlight the winning strategies our partners utilized so they can be deployed post-election.
Here are the most important SoSha digital strategy takeaways from this past election:
Organic social sharing is the cost-effective alternative to low-value digital advertisements.
The cost of political campaigns – and the digital advertisements they buy – have increased in cost dramatically over the past four election cycles. The 2024 presidential campaign cycle alone saw an earth-shattering $15.5B spent across presidential and congressional races, more than 3x the total cost of the 2000 Presidential Election.
Costs for federal elections have been ballooning since the 2000 election. Sums include all money spent by presidential candidates, Senate and House candidates, political parties and independent interest groups trying to influence federal elections.
In the Montana Senate race alone, Jon Tester and his GOP challenger Tim Sheehy spent $152.31 and $128.89 per voter on ads, respectively, making the race one of the most expensive in Senate history.
Yet this unprecedented level of advertising spend not only completely oversaturated the market but reportedly turned off many voters who felt fatigued and disenchanted by the tone of the advertisements.
This was the opposite case with our SoSha partners. In terms of curbing the high cost of campaigns, SoSha’s organic social sharing tools used for election messaging averaged a cost per click of just $0.52 – far below the industry average of $4.08 for social media advertising.
Additionally, organic social sharing naturally avoids problems of oversaturation and audience disengagement by turning ordinary people who support a campaign into online advocates, sharing their unique perspectives along with messaging to their online networks.
A vast majority of people trust recommendations from people they know, and find user-generated content more impactful than brand-related content. SoSha partnered with several partners in the political and advocacy space such as WisDems, Jane Fonda Climate PAC, and the Democratic National Committee, to diversify their outreach strategy and drive shares and impressions.
Their toolkits, along with other SoSha partners, generated huge amounts of shares, over 100,000 in the month of October alone, reaching millions of potential voters and supporters.
It’s important to align outreach strategies and tools with the right social media platform.
Over the last six years, digital media consumption has surged, surpassing traditional media in terms of time spent per day by the average American, and expected to reach eight hours in total by 2025.
Social media platforms, where Americans are spending roughly one third of that time, saw huge sums of political ad spending by both campaigns in an attempt to capitalize on this new trend and hopefully engage voters. But the approaches of the two campaigns to address the growing importance of digital media varied significantly.
Trump, facing a significant funding gap compared to the Harris campaign, narrowed in on meeting their target audience (mostly men aged 18-35) where they were. This meant a greater emphasis on platforms like YouTube, which ranks second in terms of average time per user, at 28 hours and 5 minutes per month, and Twitch, which while not as heavily trafficked, has an approximately 73.1% male demographic, as of December 2023.
Both of these platforms rely heavily on influencer marketing, a $21 billion industry that has been shown to carry more sway with audience decision making than traditional brand messaging.
Trump took full advantage of this, making high profile appearances on popular channels that subsequently got millions of views and were subsequently reposted in various forms across social media platforms.
The Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign roughly 3:1 on Google and 5:1 on Meta. However, ballooning ad costs aside, where advertisements excel at introducing messaging to a wide audience fairly quickly, they lack the authenticity and community engagement that are fundamental ingredients in political and advocacy campaign messaging.
This is where organic social sharing and user-generated content become critical tools for success. SoSha provides numerous features that empower organizations to tailor their messaging to specific platforms and audiences, while giving sharers more opportunities to customize their posts.
For example, Red Wine and Blue, a grassroots organizing nonprofit and longtime SoSha partner, utilized the full range of customizability options with their toolkits to engage suburban mothers and women in swing states. They leverage a wide variety of multimedia assets and post messaging to connect with their target audiences and promote organic sharing within their online networks.
Using a variety of multimedia, including video overlays and GIFs, Red Wine & Blue have been able to draw engagement across a variety of target audiences.
Organic social sharing takes the same amount of time as advertising, and produces sustainable engagement over the long-term.
In terms of time of composition, potential audience reach, and overall impact, SoSha partners using its organic social sharing tools saw equal to greater engagement outcomes compared to political advertising campaigns.
A common misconception about organic social sharing is that it’s slow to implement. Some worry that its decentralized nature – with primary reliance on external advocates for messaging – means slower turnaround times on campaigns and more time sifting through USG to find content to amplify.
With our SoSha partners, we’ve found the complete opposite to be the case. In comparison to the time it takes to set up the average digital advertising campaign, there seems to be little discrepancy between the two.
Additionally, in terms of audience reach, SoSha partners on average generated a share rate of 37% between the first of August to Election Day, all at a $0 CPM. The focus on community engagement and using ordinary social media users as brand advocates generating content can reach just as far as expensive ad buys.
Finally, when it comes to impact, SoSha’s organic social toolkits generate robust click rates and engagement. generating an average 17% click rate among toolkits with clickable links over the last three months. Compare this to the industry average of between 2-5%, and organic social remains just as competitive as digital advertisements, while reaping the benefits of deeper social engagement and greater cost-effectiveness over time.
The Big Picture
When it comes to both generating authentic audience engagement on social media that can counteract the fatigue of ad oversaturation and their ballooning costs, organic social sharing is the solid answer. When it comes to meeting the time, reach, and impact benchmarks organizations need to meet to successfully deploy their messaging, organic social sharing tools and strategies meet the demand and deliver results.