Social Media used by the Politicians

As it stands, the social web is bursting with opportunities for politicians to connect with voters, foster transparency, and even dispute with opponents in the same ways they have been in the traditional media for hundreds of years.

Social media like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are seen as valuable and inexpensive opportunities for politicians to promote themselves, especially in electoral campaigns. The prospect of direct contact with the public or electorate, on a continuing, unstructured basis has many advantages. Expanding contact through social networks and viral videos or messages promise to accelerate publicity while remaining person-to-person and focused.

The 2010 and 2011 elections were historic in part because information and communications technology allowed more people to participate than ever before. Through the use of social media networks such as Blogs, Twitter, email, SMS, Facebook and YouTube politicians actively reached out, connected, exchanged ideas, and promoted their points of view among the electorate to a mass audience.

We have observed the likes of Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Kevin Rud using social media successfully as part of their campaign strategy. There are over nine million Australians on Facebook and it's one of the easiest ways for voters to interact with politicians on the internet. Over one million Australians are now on Twitter giving increased scope for politicians to access the Australian people and According to YouTube people are watching 2 billion videos a day. It is believed that every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to the site. With this amount of people watching, the scope for spreading ‘the word’ for politicians is huge. 

 The most notable success for a politician using social media for an election was Barack Obama U.S. Presidential campaign of 2008.  

 

The first political campaign in history to correctly exploit the power of social media to spread a candidate’s message, gain support and get the public engaged was the 2008 campaign for the American presidency by the then Senator Barack Obama.  The Obama campaign reached 5 million supporters on 15 different social networks during the campaign season. By November 2008, Obama had approximately 2.5 million Facebook supporters, 115,000 Twitter followers, and 50 million viewers of his YouTube channel. Obama currently has in excess of 20 million Facebook followers and 40 thousand Twitter followers.

When politicians are candidates, they have this incentive to be engaging online, to be very active through social media communicating with voters to win them over. Politicians should know that engaging with voters through social media is a continuous process, and can’t simply be revived a few months or a year before the time of election. There are innovative ways to use social media to include the public in the process of governing–not just the process of campaigning.

Spin and misinterpretation can cloud a political message as it passes from candidate, to spokesperson, to media, to public. But this chain can be broken by something as simple as a Facebook update.

Julia Gillard's Facebook account

Kevin Rudd on Twitter

It seems as if our politicians have caught the social media bug, and have universally used it to connect with voters before elections. I believe that the use of these social media sites by politicians are extremely successful as part of their campaign strategy. I believe it is the way of the future and a great way for politicians to communicate with the younger generation. Now that the elections are over, there is a need for us to pay close attention to how many of the elected politicians will continue to use online social media to engage the public. I hope social media will not become just another platform for press releases, rather than a way for supporters to gain direct access.

Below are two videos that were uploaded onto YouTube at the time of the 2010 campaign by the Labor and Liberal parties.

 

 

Source 1

Source 2