Visibility and prominence in the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) is an important part of an effective online campaign. You want people to easily find your website so they can learn about you and get involved, so you have likely devoted some resources to search engine optimization such as meta tags and content key words. But, did you know that the introduction of real-time search in December on Google means that posts on social media like Twitter and Facebook may show up higher than any other content?
This means that unless you have an active social media program, providing a consistent stream of content, others may be driving your search engine results. Tweets or Facebook postings that mention you will show up in real-time search, which may be great if they're positive, but not so great if they're negative and driving people to places like HuffingtonPost.com, instead of to your own website.
What Can You Do?
1) Political campaigns and organizations should devote some resources to both generating social media content and monitoring it. You want to lead the discussion and also be aware of what others are saying. If you don't have sufficient staff or skills, consider contracting with Red State New Media to implement a consistent program on your behalf.
2) Take advantage of technology! Automatic posting to your supporters' Twitter feeds can be set up as a feature on your website, helping them spread the messages that are important to you.
3) Most of our clients use Click and Pledge for their online donation processing: Did you know that it is easy to set up an automatic posting from within Click and Pledge to your Twitter feed every time someone makes a donation? This is just one of the social media features available as part of Click and Pledge.
4) Tie your Facebook and Twitter accounts together so that posts to Twitter automatically are also posted to your Facebook page.
5) There's plenty more opportunity. Need help getting started or keeping a program active? Contact us - we can help!
