Final Project

Order Description
Social media will have an enormous and unprecedented impact on the 2016 Presidential election, with Fortune magazine even going so far as to predict that social media will determine the outcome. While social media usage amongst younger demographics was quite high in 2012, its reach has expanded dramatically amongst older demographics over the past few years, and it’s clear that Facebook (in particular) will be a very important battle ground leading up to the 2016 election. The Washington Post is reporting that 2016 might be the first “Instagram election.” And it’s reasonable to expect that Twitter will also have an important impact.
-For your final project, please do the following:

1. Choose a candidate from each party to evaluate in your final project.

2. Identify the campaign platforms upon which they will be running for election.

3. Evaluate who the “target audience” would be for those platforms (the portion of the population with whom those platforms would be most likely to resonate). In most cases, the platforms will have different audiences, though there will certainly be some overlap.

4. Identify which social networks will be most effective at reaching that target audience, with regard to both demographics/audience and the most effective posting strategies for those social networks.

5. Identify what your chosen candidates’ biggest obstacles will be (to getting elected). To do this, review the reaction the candidates received after debates and evaluate what’s being said about the candidates in the news and on social media.

6. Evaluate the chosen candidates’ social media presences as currently configured, and review their communication strategy. How do they speak to their audience? How does their audience respond? Are they effectively communicating their core platform positions? How are they working to address/overcome the obstacles identified in #5 (above)?

7. Develop a refined social media strategy for your chosen candidates, identifying their current best practices, their areas of needed improvement, and the things they can do to better promote their platforms to audiences with whom those platforms will resonate. In particular, this exercise is about helping the chosen candidates to expand their audience via the communication of those platforms.

8. Come up with a few “concepts” for social media posts/shares that would help the candidates to communicate their platform(s) to an expanded audience. Most likely, there will be only two (and a maximum of four) candidates considered to be “in the running” by next November, and winning the election will require that the finalists appeal to a much wider audience (than they currently do).

9. Identify some strategies for measuring the effectiveness of those social media posts/shares. What would define “success”?