Our world is digital and in our pocket with a smart phone. Friends, family, news, magazines, games and much more exist on a 3-inch screen. If we look up ‘Social Media’ on Wikipedia it gives: ‘Social Media are computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.’
The truth is that Social Media is much more than its Wikipedia description. It’s your digital identity, your photo album, a place of conversation, news, humor, horror and sometimes even frustration. We navigate through daily information with the never-ending question: Is this true?
Social media and politics
Aruba has one relevant platform for social media; Facebook. Founded in February 2004, Facebook has sixty-one thousand users here on Aruba and that is more than half the population. Moreover according to the Central Statistics Office it seems that we have seventy-one thousand voters.So we can definitely expect a barrage of political content saturating our feeds as we head up to the Elections in September 2017. Politicians are going to become content creators and the voters their potential subscribers. That means we will see more one-to-one campaigning through live video feeds, sharing photos, videos, advertising pages, creating events, all through the available tools on Facebook. Its side effect will be that businesses on Aruba that rely on Sponsored Stories are going to have to spend more to get the usual result. The pay-per-click price depends on market and usage and the more players in the field the more expensive online boosting gets.
Options
Facebook has also acquired Instagram and WhatsApp and in an obvious overall strategy it is now possible to convert your Instagram account into ‘a business profile’ which will give you access to Instagram Business Tools. Once completed, a promote button appears under the post and with some credit can be boosted to an audience. This new development can be seen as an opportunity for the aspiring vote-getter to set trends. And being the first to do so is a mandatory requirement for internet success. How many people will like, share, comment and keep coming back for more depends on the politicians’ effort and popularity. Making sure people will keep coming back for more is the hardest to achieve. There is another correlation between Aruba’s political landscape and social media. Tools available are very singular. As a consequence we can expect individual politicians becoming responsible for their campaigns. It is hard to imagine a party creating a fan page and promote political agendas and ideas as a group. The political brand is going to be a person instead of a traditional party. To make sure a social media strategy works one can classify (potential) voters (or in social media terms the “followers”) in three categories; the loyalists, opportunists and the free-thinkers.
The loyalist:
‘Di alma’ in Papiamento means: loyal to the soul. Loyalist followers will like, share, comment no matter what the content. The engagement to the oppositions’ content will be in a negative sense. And the one thing we know that is going to happen online is: It is going to get nasty.
The opportunist
Abstinence from engagement is the only type of online behavior that cannot be measured. Remember those times when you start writing a comment and you think: maybe not a good idea. The opportunist will watch, follow, engage little and will try to make a calculated guess on the outcome.
The free-thinker
It is the free-thinker that can be greatly influenced by excellent social media strategies. They will go through their daily feeds and need to be enticed through good creative posts and interesting agenda points in order to engage.
Bottom line
The 2017 Aruba Elections are going to be excruciatingly visible in our digital lives. In contrast Social Media will not be the solution to get voters, but it will definitely be a very important tool to get an idea or concept across. To be successful in an election campaign the attributes of a great politician have to be there. Facebook can only be an extension. As with all elections the byproduct is a media circus, so let’s enjoy the show and try to filter the crap.