• by Shawn Kemp , Op-Ed Contributor, November 3, 2015

According to a recent report by NPR, in mid-October, Ben Carson’s campaign was juggling 240 different Facebook advertisements with nearly every single one targeted to a different subset of voters. It is stats like this that make it no surprise that Facebook is on track to reap the largest upside of ad dollars from the 2016 cycle, more so than Google even. In fact, according to estimates by Citi Research, 40% of all digital ad spend for open federal seats will be spent on Facebook, totaling $428 million. And that’s just national races.

Soon the Facebook Newsfeed will become just as busy with political ads as your TV. Today in many counties and precincts you’ll find people at the voting booth weighing in on school board, mayoral and other local races. Which brings the question to the fore: How can candidates for smaller races stand apart in a sea of Facebook advertising? And, more importantly, how can they encourage people to take action, whether that be volunteering, donating, helping share the campaign’s message, or simply committing to vote? 

Let’s look at three approaches these types of campaigns can take to help drive voter action via smart Facebook strategies.

1. Put Facebook first. It is completely apparent to voters when Facebook is a campaign afterthought. With a plethora of well-targeted ads by savvy campaigns, those who treat Facebook outreach as second tier will live to regret it. This point is borne out in ActionSprout Scorecard Research with Facebook-savvy campaigns consistently earning highest fan engagement scores. Bernie Sanders’ campaign is a case in point. With 2.3M likes, his campaign would appear to be running middle of the pack – with Ben Carson at the high end with over 4M and candidates like John Kasich at the low end with just over 100k. With over 1M people “talking about this” and a recent record-breaking 1,000,000 donations, the vast majority of which were made via the Bernie Sanders website, it’s clear that “likes” don’t tell the whole story. The lesson: Focus on engagement and action over vanity metrics. 

2. Targeting is smart; targeting with tailored messages and calls-to-action is smarter. While this sounds like a no-brainer, it can get complicated quickly as you can see from Ben Carson’s example. A good, old-fashioned message map helps with this exercise, but that is only half the battle. A smart campaign will track each ad to see how it performs, tracking how the message resonated, if the ad vehicle chosen was the best choice, response rate to the call-to-action, rates of sharing, and more. Compiling this data, campaigns should then circle back to their low-performing ads and test a different combination until they find a winning formula for any given demographic. For small campaigns, keep in mind that this does not have to break the bank. You can learn a lot from a few small tests.

Crunching this data will help campaigns understand why Facebook needs to be a top priority; it can give near real-time feedback to messages within very finely targeted audiences. What better place to assess talking points than in small, hand-selected groups? 

3. To increase response rates, eradicate any potential hurdles to responding to a call-to-action. As I noted in my last article, many politicians point voters to their web site for further information, to donate or volunteer, rather than keeping them in the Facebook context. Doing so has proven to deteriorate response rates as once on Facebook, people like to stay on Facebook. Get rid of anything that presents a stumbling block to responding to a call-to-action, such as lengthy forms on a mobile device.
This Facebook ad from Re Sources for Sustainable Communities illustrates the point well. They ran an easy-to-respond to ad that allowed voters in the county to look up and update their registration with a click. The ad outperformed its page's engagement average by 334% and in the process they helped hundreds of people add or update their voter registration.

Last, watch and learn from the best practices of the most tech-savvy candidates running major, national campaigns. How, for example, does Bernie Sanders encourage his fans to share content and thereby decrease his need to advertise? Which candidate whose demographics most resemble yours is generating the most grassroots appeal with their social outreach and why? 

Make your message short, impactful and keep the engagement simple. Voters are all about participating in ways that are fast and impactful. Help them achieve this goal and you’ll not only increase awareness among your Facebook demographics, but you’ll find greater engagement across your calls-to-action—now that’s something even the best organized national campaigns can learn from.