15/01/2016 | 22:10 GMT+7
Unless you’ve been living under a social media rock, it’s clear that the presidential election season is fully upon us. Between issues, debates, new polling data and building momentum towards the upcoming primaries, headlines and social posts are brimming with political rhetoric, facts and figures and predictions.
Candidates and political groups are proving to be more social than ever this year, with social channels growing in influence, changing the rules and shifting how candidates think about marketing.
Here in the Spredfast Research & Insights department, we’ve been collecting data about candidates and their messages over the past few months. We’ve been particularly interested in the language used by each candidate and how audiences are responding to various talking points, topics and calls to action.
The overall takeaway is that language matters for marketers, political or not. We waded through the political social language to figure out:
Let’s dive into the data and find out.
From a data perspective, we grabbed each current candidate’s recent Twitter history to create a database of more than 40,000 tweets from 2015, removing all retweets and replies.
We then used a process called natural language processing to sift through the words used by each candidate. Our analysis removed some common words like "the” and "of” — called "stopwords” — that we weren’t interested in for this study.
As we sifted through the data, we focused on the top frequently mentioned terms across all candidates. We weren’t interested in words mentioned once here or there — we wanted to examine consistent performance for terms — so terms mentioned by a candidate fewer than five times weren’t included in results. See a full list of the most frequently mentioned terms at the bottom of this post.*
For candidates’ tweets, including Bernie Sanders’ (shown here), Spredfast analyzed top frequently mentioned terms and their engagement rate as compared to a benchmark rate.
In addition to frequency counts, we collected data on the engagement (the retweets and likes) for each piece of content. We used engagement as a measure of effectiveness — the more retweets and likes a tweet received, the more it resonated with each candidate’s audience.
We started by pooling all the social data together and checking for the most frequently used terms across the entire field of presidential hopefuls.
What topics and terms are candidates using the most?
High-level views across all candidates give us some guidance toward best practices, but every marketer knows that their individual audience is different from the industry as a whole. In order to offer strategic direction on a social content strategy, we need to get down to the candidate level.
So let’s look at a few candidates’ posting patterns– not only which terms are being well-received by their audience, but also how often each candidate is mentioning those topics.
To do this, we’ll map terms on a graph for each candidate based on two axes: how well the audience responded to the language (retweets + likes) versus how often the candidate used each term. Don’t worry, it will make more sense in a minute.
With the graphs below, we created three main sections:
As mentioned above, Trump’s recent volley of content mentioning "women” has not only received a positive reaction from his audience, it’s the most positive engagement on that topic we’ve seen over the past few months.
Before a recent collection of five tweets on the subject, "women” was one of Trump’s worst-performing social terms. But with the fresh push from his campaign, the tide has turned.
We can track mentions of "women” against the Twitter response over time to see the pattern of growing engagement from his followers for the term.
Let’s move on to another high-polling Republican candidate, Dr. Ben Carson.
Now on to Florida’s Marco Rubio.
Let’s not forget the Democrats. Will we find the same patterns on the other side of the aisle? Let’s start with Hillary Clinton.
And now let’s keep moving on to Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.
As we’ve seen, by getting smart about language patterns, campaigns and marketers can test different tactics to check an audience’s response. It’s important to note that these findings aren’t set in stone: We know that the effectiveness of these terms will ebb and flow with current events and topic saturation.
But having a smart approach to a social team’s communication strategy can only raise a candidate’s — or your — performance.
Remember to choose your social language wisely with your audience in mind, check the competition to see what’s working for them, and experiment with new content strategies frequently.
Google January 2020 Core Update rolling out later today
Google has pre-announced yet another core update, keep an eye on your rankings -- it will begin rolling out soon.
Google is Releasing a Broad Core Algorithm Update Today, September 24th
Google has given SEOs and site owners advance notice that a broad core algorithm update will be released later today.
Brand Bidding & PPC Optimization: The Value Of Brand Keywords (Part 2 of 8)
Columnist Lori Weiman continues her series on brand bidding for PPC by discussing how brand terms improve the bottom line for advertisers.
PPC Paydirt: Check Out Our Top Paid Search Columns Of 2015!
From retargeting tactics to time-saving AdWords scripts, our top SEM columns from the past year covered a diverse range of topics. Check them out!
The Majority of B2B Companies Are Using Incomplete Data
Almost three quarters of the records in B2B marketing databases are inaccurate or incomplete, according to a new study by Dun & Bradstreet NetProspex.
Forget B2B or B2C - It's About C2B
Speakers at IBM Amplify zero in on a better way to think about marketing strategy—the customer-to-business approach.
Paid social, even print tops SEM as marketing priorities for SMBs, survey finds
Paid-search ranked near the bottom of the list for 2019. Google has spent years building out a third party partner/reseller network focused on small businesses (SMBs). And while there have always been ROI (perception) and retention challenges with AdWords, a new survey from BrandMuscle suggests paid search is being deprioritized by SMBs in their overall marketing mix.
What Time Is The Super Bowl? Google & Bing Are Confused
You might get information for 2015, depending on how you ask.