Hey guys welcome back to my blog!
The 2020 elections are just around the corner and it’s everything people are talking about. That’s why I think it’s imperative that this week I talk to you about politics and how the use of the social media channels help them reach and engage with the public more effectively than regular marketing. I am from Puerto Rico; hence I will be discussing the running candidates for governor of PR which include, Alexandra Lugaro, Charlie Delgado, Pedro Pierluisi, Juan Dalmau, Cesar Vázquez and Eliezer Molina. Inside this year’s election we have a mix of candidates including some longstanding veterans of the ballots, with some newcomers. I will analyze the social media channel Twitter, because as we know it’s one of the most used platforms for politicians; I mean we all have seen how much our President Trump loves his twitter account! For this blog I will be comparing Alexandra Lugaro’s twitter page to Eliezer Molina’s, because she is a candidate that has run before and has a very strong social media presence in contrast with the new candidate that has very little presence.
Alexandra Lugaro has been in the political picture since last year when she first ran for governor with the independent political party Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana. She made a great impact in her first year with her liberal ways of thinking especially towards the young generations but that didn’t reflect on the results, due to the fact that she wasn’t a hit to the older population who are the strong force voters of the Island. Today she a has gained a big fan base, which consists of 82.9K followers on Twitter. How was she able to go from nothing to this? Easy; she strategically used Twitter as a marketing platform in which she is constantly engaging with the public through various strategic ways. That include posting constantly on twitter through political tweets of her projects and proposal to make PR better, retweeting and commenting on false tweets from the press and other competitors, visuals, videos of her engaging with the community and educational videos of the importance of defending the people’s vote. She also uses hashtags like #Lugaro2020, #VotoAusente, #DefiendeElVoto, #Seamoselcambio, y #Elcambiova; which is an amazing strategy, to invite the audience to engage and use the hashtag every time they tweet something about her campaign. The hashtag also unifies all the information relevant to her campaign, helping the content not disappear in Twitter’s fast paced interactions and conversations.
On the other end we have Eliezer Molina, who lacks greatly in his Twitter presence, counting only with 2,188 followers. Why you may ask? Well, on the contrary to Lugaro’s effective strategy, he doesn’t post constantly and doesn’t show much effort in educating the public about his platforms, stances or projects. He uses very little hashtags like #unsolopueblo, #Eliezer2020, #PuertoRico, which this last hashtag is just too vague. Even though Lugaro and Eliezer have the same objective with their campaigns -encouraging and educating the masses to vote for a new candidate to stop the PPD and PNP from continuing the corruption and injustices against the people-it’s evident that Lugaro’s efforts give her a huge advantage over Eliezer. You may think that because Lugaro has lots of negative comments, it’s not looking good for her, but on the contrary with every negative comment, you also see people speaking out and defending her name, bringing a lot of traffic to her page. Meanwhile Eliezer has very little interaction on his tweets, decreasing his exposure.
Therefore, to give Eliezer a fighting chance on this election, I recommend increasing the frequency of posting content to almost every day, increasing the use of hashtags, stop focusing on attacking the governor or the competitors and concentrate on educating the people of his proposals and projects to help Puerto Rico. Emphasize in his content that he is a farmer and create more videos of him engaging and helping out the community in order to create a more wholesome image for the people. Just as Lugaro was not fully prepared and defined her first time around, my biggest recommendation is for Eliezer to find his strengths and what makes him different from the other candidates and use that to create a strong presence not just on social media, but on the political picture. When he truly knows what he represents, he will be able to do it confidently in will undoubtedly attract people who share the same ideals.
