New Tool Helps Politicians Advertise on Facebook ~ Pare News

Thank you for using rssforward.com! This service has been made possible by all our customers. In order to provide a sustainable, best of the breed RSS to Email experience, we've chosen to keep this as a paid subscription service. If you are satisfied with your free trial, please sign-up today. Subscriptions without a plan would soon be removed. Thank you!

Have you ever come across political advertisements on Facebook? There’s a real science behind those ads, and a new service is aiming to help politicians understand and use that science to better connect with people.

Socialitical, a project of TargetedSocial, is a social media company designed to help politicians reach potential voters on Facebook.

Corey Gottlieb, the company’s managing partner, says Sociolitical’s goal is to become a “one-stop shop for campaigns and PACs.” The company has two of the six 2012 presidential candidates already on-board. But it’s not just gunning for the big clients – it wants state and local politicians to sign on, too. And the company strives to make the process of buying ads easier for all politicians.

Sociolitical provides three types of services to politicians. First are “creative services,” which involve standard social media optimization (SMO). Next are “core services,” where Sociolitical’s employees get more involved. They fully manage a candidate’s Facebook presence and handle all creative writing, while providing insights (easily shared with campaign staff) into every ad campaign’s performance. Finally, there’s “social listening,” which offers monitoring of social media “buzz.”

Using the information that Facebook users provide about themselves, (including city, ZIP code, level of education, age, gender and marital status) Sociolitical can very precisely target specific demographics of users. That makes a lot of sense – you wouldn’t speak to a 65-year-old AARP member the same way you’d speak to a 20-year-old college student, so you shouldn’t advertise to them the same way, either. That data can also be used to target people in key battleground states, which are crucial to national political campaigns.

Sociolitical’s approach is heavily video-centric. Users who click on a client’s ad are taken to a custom tab on a politician’s page where a video plays, so users who click ads are instantly interacting with a page. A politician’s page could also leave a cookie in a user’s browser, helping Sociolitical to target campaigns to certain demographics outside of the Facebook platform — the “holy grail” of Facebook ads, Gottlieb says.

Every advertisement designed by Sociolitical gets pre-approved by a politician’s campaign. Information about prior campaigns are archived to help Sociolitical’s staff learn about what worked and what didn’t, improving their product in the long run. Sociolitical delivers important metrics, like click-through rates and cost-per-like, in easily readable and sharable formats. A sort of “success speedometer” and other charts show an advertising campaign’s success in comparison to its previously agreed-upon goal.

All this makes Facebook a unique and powerful platform for politicians looking to reach out to voters.

For the majority of his career, Gottlieb was in the television sales industry. He says that, given his TV experience, he’s “blown away” by the metrics that Facebook can deliver and the precision with which different groups of people can be targeted.

What’s next for Sociolitical? Gottlieb says the 2012 elections are just about to heat up, and he expects to be hearing from plenty of politicians at the state and local levels as they gear up for November.

What do you think about political advertisements on Facebook? Let us know in the comments below.

More About: 2012 presidential campaign, Facebook, Social Media