Social media is an important platform for 2016 Presidential candidates. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram matter because they are where 18-24 year olds are getting their news – and communicating with their friends. Women are big social media users, too. Getting them to the polls will impact who wins the election.
In Hillary’s Race For 2016: Turning Followers Into Votes, on Forbes.com, I examine which candidates are winning on social media. Here are five reasons why Hillary is in the lead:
1.She has the most control over her online image: if anyone enters a Google search for “Hillary Clinton,” much of the first two pages of results will be sites she manages. Her digital assets include:
2. Facebook. She has almost one million likes on Facebook, where women aged 18 to 29 are the majority of users.
3. Twitter. Hillary has almost 4 million followers on Twitter; Jeb Bush just over 250,000. 37% of female Internet users between the ages of 18-29 use Twitter.
4. Instagram. Instagram is the most popular social media platform for people in their 20s.
5. She has an Official Hillary 2016 Playlist on Spotify – a collection of upbeat, inspiring songs to accompany her campaign. They can be widely shared by followers on their Facebook and Twitter feeds.
This doesn’t mean the other candidates lack digital assets (Donald Trump’s substantial media footprint includes almost 2 million Facebook likes). It just illustrates the importance of social media currency in the 2016 election…and elsewhere in politics.
This post includes excerpts from an essay first published by Forbes.com on June 22, 2015. That article has been shared over 14,000 times on Facebook.