Reflections on political use of social media

Last week as part of my studies (after a month of much drama re: new job, partner injury and the old job) I managed to rattle out an assignment involving a period of monitoring political social media network usage.

For the report I monitored the ALP and Greens social network presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube from the beginning of this month through to the Saturday after the release of the Federal Budget, with the aim of comparing the ways in which the two parties used the various platforms during a time of significant policy debate. 

It was an interesting experience. From doing a look around at the number of views/retweets/likes/etc each bit of social network content gathered I've gained a stronger perspective as to what constitutes an affordable social networking experience for the intangiable "average user" (albeit, not one that can be disaggregated down to demographic groups - which seems to be 9/10's of the current political campaigning lore's aim).

Unfortunately, due to absurdly small word count restrictions or my bad research presentation skills - probably the latter - I had to cut the section recommending ways in which the two parties could improve their use of their various social networking accounts out of the final version of the assignment. 

Fortunately (mostly for my sanity, as the project had a wonderful tendency to broaden its scope every time I set finger to key) I hadn't gotten to the stage where I might have edited and honed the raw recommendations into the horrid little essay style which whoever reading this has probably already suffered enough of. 

So it follows that the recommendations below are in gloriously readable dot-point format and are relatively informal.

I hope someone enjoys them.

Recommendations for the Australian Labor Party

• Possibly promoting Member of Parliament social networking contributions on their main page (see The Greens' main page, which has a feed of the latest tweets from their MPs) might be a good idea if the aim is to project the image of a party that engages with digital citizens.
• maintain a list of MPs who twitter/Facebook/myspace/etc in each State on their federal and State sites so that would-be followers can find them easier.
• encourage more direct engagement on social networks: have rostered MPs (or, more realistically, staffers) reply to posts on the ALP Facebook group wall about matters within their portfolio via their Facebook accounts and similarly (for Twitter)  generate reply tweets regarding policy discussions, but keep them short - link to a page with facts debunking an argument rather than attempting to explain complex arguments in 160 characters. It may be better to reply to critiquing messages via an associated account (maybe the one associated with the Minister whose portfolio is being critiqued?)
• have more MPs run their social network presences rather than staffers (as it gives the subscriber/follower/fan a greater sense of involvement and personalisation) or at least attempt to educate staffers as to more effective at social media engagement (eg: if your Minister is putting out a press release, a bland title and a shortened URL link is the minimum you should do. Far better would be to use hashtags so people interested in the topic can find the tweet easier and for additional links to a blog post explaining/supporting the press release would be grand).
• Use Julia Gillard’s Twitter account more - despite being older than the party’s account and attracting more than ten times the number of followers it has less than a quarter of the content. The disparity in following numbers may be linked to the ALP account’s status as a relatively dry read, @JuliaGillard’s isn't particularly enthralling though. @KRuddMP and @TurnbullMalcolm  are interesting case studies re: non-dry political style;
• re-branding Labor Connect so it doesn’t have two faceless white men as its logo might be a first step (the ALP has enough problems with allegations that it’s run by faceless men without its primary web presence visually confirming the rumour).

Recommendations for the Australian Greens:

• on their website: have links to the primary Greens social network accounts; also have a page which has each MP/party official’s social network involvement rather than spreading it across multiple pages - this would make it easier to follow/subscribe-to/like/etc each respective party official;
• more on-message focus when a major policy event is occurring, keeping the official accounts clear for Australian issue information dissemination rather than tangentially relevant (the Canadian election generated lots of noise during a rather busy policy week in the lead up to the federal budget - where the Greens had quite a few policy victories that it could claim);
• Use Senator Bob Brown’s Twitter account more - it attracts five times the number of followers yet generates almost no content from day to day compared to the other accounts;
• keep reply tweets short and link to content on blogs or elsewhere if the reply’s message cannot be contained in a single tweet or will be hidden in Facebook comments (there was a horrible example of over-engagement in the @GreenMPs account around 13 May where more oxygen was given to a possible troll than necessary).