Making use of social media
Do you use Facebook or Flickr? Do you blog and/or Twitter?
If not, why don’t you? Social media is fast becoming as important in online presence having as a website. are all new ways of getting your message across. Ignore them at your peril. But you can’t just go blundering in. It needs thought, technique, and to be maintained.
If you use social media, you have to think about it beforehand. How often do you want it updated? Who is going to update it? How will it be monitored and who do the monitoring? If you can’t update and monitor it, don’t start it – nothing looks worse than a blog or Twitter account that haven’t been updated for weeks!
Social Media isn’t an all-or-nothing activity – you can use Facebook but not tweet, blog but not use Flickr. They are have different up- and down-sides, and require different things.
Facebook is pretty much a must – you can set it up for free, and create both a profile and a fan page. It is then pretty easy to get people to join up to it, through the rather extensive political networks which have formed and the ease at which it is possible to join. It also requires pretty little continual maintenance.
Flickr
If you have a website and you have photos, use Flickr! It is, basically, a free online photo gallery – and by uploading your pictures to it, it is a very easy way to increase the number of results that turn up on a Google search. There’s no downside here!
Blogging
Blogging means putting your opinion out there on a range of issues – both local and national – and being effectively on the record. It can be risky, but if you think before you type, no more so than making a speech or sending a press release.
Blogging is a big online activity, and to blog properly you need to have a) permalinks (a direct link to that post); b) an RSS feed (so that people can read your posts without having to visit the site itself); and c) the opportunity to make comments. If these are not present, it is usually deemed by the blogosphere to not be a blog (see Nadine Dorries for an example of the issues that can cause).
“Do you tweet?”
Twitter is the medium of the moment, involving comments with a maximum of 140 characters posted regularly. It is often referred to as “micro-blogging”, as it allows a politician to post regular short and sweet comments, but it also allows and encourages debates and interaction.
There are two main ways a politician can tweet:
- As a campaign
- Personally
The second way is definitely the most effective, and you can if you’re interesting enough gain quite a number of “followers” (people who read your tweets), even though it is most likely that few will actually be in your constituency. This does require willingness on the behalf of the candidate to do this – it can be time-consuming and addictive, but is worthwhile.
Tweeting as a campaign is less effective but far less resource-heavy, but does need to be maintained and monitored regularly anyway, and can easily be done by the campaign team rather than the candidate themselves.
