Abstract
This study inductively develops a new conceptual framework for analyzing strategic campaign communications across different social media platforms through an analysis of candidate social media strategies during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle. We conducted a series of open-ended, in-depth qualitative interviews with campaign professionals active during the 2016 presidential cycle. Our analysis revealed that scholars need to account for the ways that campaigns perceive their candidates in addition to the audiences, affordances, and genres of different social media platforms, as well as the timing of the electoral cycle, in order to effectively study strategic social media communication. Our findings reveal that campaigns proceed from perceptions of their candidates’ public personae and comfort with engagement on social media. Campaigns perceive that social media platforms vary according to their audiences, including their demographics and other characteristics; with respect to their affordances, actual and perceived functionalities; the genres of communication perceived to be appropriate to them; and the timing of the electoral cycle, which shapes messaging strategies and the utility of particular platforms. These factors shape how campaigns use social media in the service of their electoral goals. We conclude by developing these findings into an analytic framework for future research, arguing that researchers should refrain from automatically generalizing the results of single-platform studies to “social media” as a whole, and detailing the implications of our findings for future political communication research.
Acknowledgement
The authors wish to thank editor Claes deVreese and guest editors Leticia Bode and Emily Vraga for their guidance on this study, as well as for attending our 8am APSA presentation and suggesting we submit to the special issue. Shannon C. McGregor also wishes to thank the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research for their support in the early stages of this project.
Notes
1. Facebook, and other technology firms, have self-regulated privacy considerations with respect to the use of their users’ data. As such, campaigns cannot target known, individual citizens on Facebook with appeals as directly as they could through other mediums such as direct mail. Instead they rely on third parties to match names from the voter file to users and receive anonymized data back on the performance of their ads. They can also target based on demographics or shared Facebook usage characteristics. As such, campaigns always know their audiences imperfectly. For a full discussion, see Kreiss (Citation2016).
2. It should be noted that in February 2016, Twitter gradually rolled out a non-chronological (algorithmically driven) timeline, which, over several iterations, stands currently as an opt-in feature (see https://support.twitter.com/articles/164083). As this feature continues to develop, scholars (and practitioners) should note that users might not uniformly have a chronological timeline as their Twitter setting.