Social media is emerging as a key way for politicians and political organizations to engage and activate voters. To better understand how politicians are faring with audience engagement, we analyzed each U.S. senator's Facebook page and how well the content on it engaged its intended audience.

Candidates' views aren't the only things taking shape in the run-up to another long election season. Different issues are being discussed throughout the country - both private and public - across personal and industrial lines, and as the sides clarify their terms they become more and more clearly political.

Attention, campaign managers and principals. Permit me to clue you into something your digital people already know well but that you may be discounting when they say it because it sounds self-serving: Facebook will require more of your campaign resources to use well in 2016 than it did in 2012, 2014, or even this month. The social media colossus is increasingly important and increasingly complex.

Measuring the impact of advertising on the buyer's journey through the sales funnel has become known, in marketing parlance, as attribution. It is a hot topic among CMOs, agencies and in a growing number of SMB organizations. It is also a topic that will be of keen interest to those agencies that specialize in supporting political campaigns in the lead-up to the 2016 elections.