Down Home Digital: Eyes Front, Facebook Forward

Facebook is everywhere. Even if all 400 million users worldwide are not in your district, the sheer size of the audience (in the USA, Facebook estimates around 120 million accounts) and the volume of interaction (half of all users check in daily, according to the company) make it a pretty good bet that you’ll bump into more than a few people who can vote for you on Facebook. But keep your goals in perspective—your candidate is not Barack Obama or Sarah Palin. If you’re running a campaign for local office or the state legislature, several hundred fans might be a realistic goal; if you’re running a statewide race, perhaps several thousand fans might be your goal. The key is to make sure that you interact with each of them.
We spoke with Adam Conner of Facebook’s public policy team about how campaigns can use Facebook effectively. As he pointed out, Facebook is just a digital megaphone. It’s up to the campaign to say something. At the most basic level, a campaign could use Facebook just as another channel to publish information about the campaign. Even if your supporters aren’t checking your campaign website every day, they can see your Facebook updates in their newsfeeds. These updates can be more than just messages—you can add photos and videos to your news stream (yet another reason to not leave home without the camera). Facebook has a feature that allows you to “tag” the people who appear in a photo, which automatically sends a message to that person. You’d be surprised (or not) at how posting photos of people gets them engaged.
One final thought on what you post to Facebook: Unlike Twitter, you are not limited to 140 characters on Facebook. Take the time to adapt what you have to say to each medium. But, don’t be like James Michener and write a long-winded novel. If you have a lot to communicate, you are best served on Facebook by posting a few sentences and attaching a link to a longer post or article.
Taking it up another level, Facebook’s advertising system makes it easy for campaigns to connect with constituents. You don’t need a Facebook page to use this system, but the built-in integration with your page makes it easy to convert prospects into fans. The self-service ad administration tool allows campaigns to target by geographic location (note to Nevada candidates: we shouldn’t be seeing your Facebook ads in Virginia) and interests (conservative, liberal, American Idol, etc.). For the cost of a pizza, you could have an ad campaign running in the time it takes to read this article.
If your candidate “gets” the potential of Facebook, you can use the platform to engage in person-to-person connections. Of course, you can have a staffer responding to routine requests (yard sign, please?), but with a little planning the candidate, the campaign manager or senior staffers can engage in specific dialog to energize your supporters. It could be as simple as having the candidate send messages thanking the individuals who attended an event to something as orchestrated as a scheduled chat session.
If you haven’t already gotten up to speed on the basic lingo of Facebook, one key distinction to understand is the difference between the personal profile and the “page.” Think of the personal profile as the individual and the “page” as the campaign. Many smaller campaigns start off using the candidate’s own profile as the campaign’s presence on Facebook. Unfortunately, that’s like holding all of the campaign events in the candidate’s living room. Facebook’s advice (and we concur) is to set up a page for the campaign. The page acts more like a mini-website within Facebook and provides several useful features (such as multiple administrators and the ability to advertise) that are not available to the personal profile.
Beyond these basics, there are many more features and applications that you can use to boost your Facebook presence. Before you get there, though, remember that Facebook is an open megaphone to your community. The most important suggestion we can pass along is to not let your Facebook page be like the website that has a perpetual “updates coming soon.”
Everyone in your campaign should be thinking about using Facebook to enhance his or her activities, but you should have at least one person tasked with the daily care and feeding of the candidate’s Facebook presence. Spending 15 to 20 minutes every day checking messages and posting material will get you to a basic level. Plan to spend a lot more if you really want Facebook to be a game changer. Steve Pearson is president of CivicNEXT, which provides practical networking, communications and fundraising solutions for political campaigns and organizations. Ford O’Connell is president of ProjectVirginia, winner of the 2010 Reed Award for Best Use of Twitter.