🤓 Bite-Sized Knurd: Social media amplification can help spread a candidate’s message wider more easily and quickly. It’s the perfect tool to get your supporters motivated and reach more voters in your district. 

With less than a month left in the Midterm election, GOTV season is in full swing and it’s more important than ever to get in front of voters, especially for local races with more limited name recognition. 

Social media is a powerful tool in a candidate’s toolbelt when it’s executed well. It has the ability to spread awareness of your campaign and your message to supporters and voters in your district, but it can also be time-consuming. 

The best way to get the most out of social media without spending too much time on it is through social media amplification. 

Amplify to Spread the Word 

Social amplification is the idea of using your network of allies to help get your posts seen more. 

It is simply asking people and organizations who support you to spread your message on their own social profiles. Since not everyone has the same followers, when other people post on your behalf, more and different people will see your posts than if you posted on your own. 

The technique of social amplification has the potential to significantly grow the number of people that see your posts. If you have 5 friends share your post and each post is seen by 200 people, then 1,000 people have seen your posts. That’s only with 5 friends, imagine what can be done with your many supporters! 

How Amplification Works 

This can be accomplished through an amplification strategy as well as following best practices for each social media site. Developing a social amplification strategy can be simple and just requires three things:

• Goals:  What are you hoping to accomplish from your social media post (fundraising, GOTV, etc.)? Knowing this ahead of time makes it easier to create posts and identify allies who will help accomplish your goal. 
• Allies: Identify allies to help spread a message. This can be anyone who supports you including voters, volunteers, organizations that have endorsed you, elected officials, etc. 
• A Social Toolkit: The final step is creating sample posts (text and graphics) that allies can use to amplify your message. The most common technique is the social toolkit, an organized file that makes it easy for your allies to post on your behalf. (download our Guide for a template)

Once you have these pieces in place, you will take your social toolkit, which includes instructions, sample graphics, and sample captions, and send it to your allies asking them to post to their own social profiles usually on a certain date. Then you can watch your allies posting on your behalf and manage the social campaign by commenting, retweeting supporters, and more. 

Social amplification has gained steamed as a way to get more people excited to vote for Democrats in the 2022 Midterms and is being widely used by Senate campaigns, PACs, political parties, and more. The John Fetterman campaign holds weekly Zoom social media trainings to help them amplify their campaign message. Way to Win has developed social media toolkits to amplify ad-tested social posts on crucial issues before the midterms.

For more information, step-by-step instructions, and a social toolkit template, download our Social Amplification for GOTV Season Guide. 

Top Tips for Social Media

Finally, it’s important to consider some tips on how to use social media effectively in today’s landscape. 

• Relational is the key. Relational organizing, the act of mobilizing personal contacts within an activist’s network to support collective action, has grown in popularity as an organizing tactic because it is an authentic way to connect and ask people to take action. The same idea can work on social media by encouraging connections to share to their personal profiles. 
• Visual Storytelling increases engagement. Visuals can be very powerful tools to evoke emotion and get people excited about the issues you care most about. Use images, GIFs, or videos to reinforce values through visualization rather than over-relying on text. 
• Know Your Goal. One of the most important tips in any communication is to know what needs to be accomplished. Whether the goal is for more event sign-ups, GOTV, or fundraising, a social post is more likely to succeed if it’s designed to meet the goal. 
• Less is more. Voters are busy. Few will take the time to read through everything. Keep captions and text short and straight to the point to get the message across.
• Right place at the right time. Instagram Reels is officially the best way to grow on Instagram because Instagram is prioritizing TikTok-like content. Posting more Reels will help more of your posts be seen.

For even more detail on Social Ampflication, watch our training hosted in partnership with Swing Left San Francisco. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiKqMvACLxQ