THREAD: Politics and social media (yeah, I know, I know). Apologies for the length, but there’s a lot to unpack here and the detail is important to explains how the Tories are winning the social media war. There’s a dearth of informed opinion on this topic out there. So here goes
Before I start, let me say that I don’t *know* exactly what the Tories’ social media strategy is. But I’ve pieced this together from previous Vote Leave admissions, watching the campaign play out and my own knowledge and experience as a social media manager. Anyhow …
One thing has been obvious to me from this General Election campaign – the Tories are streets ahead of both Labour and the Lib Dems in their understanding of how to leverage social media, and in particular targeted ads, media manipulation and ‘dark social’
Let’s start with targeted ads. We all know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but the reality is the Tories are still leaning heavily on personal profiling and paid ads, particularly targeting floating voters in marginals. How can they do this? Because it’s *legal*
Profiling goes way beyond your Facebook profile. Every action you take online helps build your profile. Do you like/share certain types of content? Do you stop to read a post or watch a video? Where does your phone’s GPS say you are? It all helps build a picture of you
So ads can be targeted at voters in marginal constituencies, and algorithms can infer whether you are a committed Tory, a committed Labour voter or – most valuably – an ‘undecided’. It’s not 100% accurate, but even 50% reliability means ad spend can be targeted more efficiently
Cue a barrage of targeted ads in this closing week of the election aimed at swaying floating voters in marginals. These are pushed into individuals’ feeds, so not public. 90% of us will never see these, as they’re not meant for us. So we wonder what all the fuss is about
“If I haven’t seen it, it can’t be happening”, right? Wrong
If you are in the target group, you might see 10 of these every day. Vote Leave confirmed they spent around 90% of their ad budget on Facebook ads in the final week of the 2016 referendum campaign. It worked before. So you can be sure they’re doing it again
If you doubt whether social media ads work, ask yourself why major brands now spend so much on this new form of advertising. The company I work for spends millions of dollars a year on social ads, because we can measure that they work
Let’s talk now about how skilfully the Tories are using social media to manipulate mainstream journalists and the general news agenda
We start with a tweet or a Facebook post containing fake or selectively truthful information. Maybe this comes directly from Boris Johnson’s or the Conservatives’ account
It is then amplified by other accounts aligned to share such messages – these may be bots or ‘sock puppets’, people paid to look like Joe Public but in effect no more than megaphones
Often these messages are straight copy-and-paste jobs, with identical text being published from multiple accounts. Here’s an example of systematic disinformation from yesterday … 
And here’s another one – note how the text posted by these different users is *identical* …
Now here’s where it gets interesting. When you look at sock puppet or bot accounts, they often don’t have that many followers. So you’d think they can’t actually reach that many people, right? Wrong
It’s not about how many people you reach or target, it’s about how influential those people are and how big their audiences are
If you address a tweet at, say, a serious, neutral journalist like @bbclaurak (1.1m Twitter followers) or @Peston (1m), a willing right-winger like @JuliaHB1 (200k) or even a celebrity like former cricket star Kevin Pietersen @KP24 (3.9m) and they retweet it, it has serious reach
People who follow them then retweet their tweets, because we all like to demonstrate that we have our finger on the pulse, right? So before you know it, a tweet by a sock puppet with 70 followers has been seen by 5 million people
Even if they later discover the tweet contains fake info and tweet out an apology or retraction – as both @bbclaurak and @Peston did yesterday and @KP24 today - the damage is done. The sock puppets amplify their original tweet, and that becomes the story
So what yesterday should have been a furore about Boris Johnson showing no empathy for an ill 4-year-old and snatching a journalist’s phone becomes a story about anti-Tories staging a faked photo. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie as long as it becomes *the* story of the day
It’s classic influencer marketing. You don’t need to build millions of followers. Just leverage those who already have. And, better still, if they’re perceived as serious, neutral journalists, the message carries greater weight because it’s seen as unbiased
A note: when ‘fake’ messages are widely shared, they tend to float to the top of Google search results. Fake news trumps real news. So if someone does a quick search to verify whether what they’ve just read is true, a quick search floods their results with these fake posts
So we assume they’re true. They must be, right? Wrong (or, at least, not necessarily right). I’ve seen people fall for this time and time again. I have too! We’re conditioned to trust Google, especially when it confirms what we want to be true
Psychologists have a term for this: ‘confirmation bias’. Basically, we’re more inclined to believe ‘facts’ if they reinforce our existing views. People like to be proven right and will self-rationalise even the most ridiculous claims sometimes. We all do it
Now let’s move on to ‘dark social’. What’s that, you ask? Dark social refers to non-public areas of social media where only selected users can see content. Facebook groups, for instance. Let’s talk about these
All over Facebook there are local groups covering specific towns. Many have 20k-50k followers, so they’re big. And they’re populated by ‘people like us’ – family, friends, neighbours – sharing info about local events, complaining about road closures, and, yes, talking politics
Because the people in this groups are folks we feel connected to, they are by their nature influential. So what happens when a political party targets a tweet at, say, an admin of a local group in a marginal constituency, and they share it in the group?
Boom! An instant audience of tens of thousands of people, highly targeted by location, and promoted by someone that group members are inclined to trust. Again, a supremely effective use of influencer marketing. And you can only see it at work if you’re in one of these groups
The Tories are doing all of the above. They’re doing it very effectively. And this allows them to use their already huge social media budgets incredibly efficiently. In fact, most of the above doesn’t even require paid ads – just social media savvy
When I look at what @UKLabour and @LibDems are doing, their approach is much more traditional ‘old media’. They release PR-style content, sometimes through the party accounts, sometimes through personal ones such as @jeremycorbyn
Okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. After all @jeremycorbyn has 2.3 million followers. But who are those 2.3m people? Mostly they’re dyed-in-the-wool Labour supporters who don’t need convincing. How many of those followers are floating voters? Not many, I’d bet
A traditional PR approach like this is like firing a blunderbuss. You’ll hit some of the people you’re targeting, but you’ll miss most of them, and you’ll waste a lot of people talking to people you don’t need to talk to
Which is kind of ironic, don’t you think, when the Tories are painted as the party of older, non-social media users. And yet the Tories are doing the best job here. They have worked out how to manipulate both traditional and social media, and they’re doing it ruthlessly
I’m not going to say that social media will be the biggest factor in deciding this general election campaign. But in an election where a few thousand votes in a few marginal constituencies could make all the difference, effective use of social *will* be significant ~END~
