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Today, November 8, 2016, millions of Americans are casting their votes in a historic election. Republican candidate, Donald Trump, takes on Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, in a race for the White House like we’ve never seen before. Social media has been a major communication outlet and engagement driver for both candidates during the lead-up to the election, so it makes us ask the question: could their performance on the various social platforms actually predict their performance at the polls?

LiftMetrix analyzed both candidates’ social actions (likes, shares, comments, retweets) across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in the final week leading up to the election (November 1 - 8, 2016), as well as the content strategies that each candidate employed in their last push for the presidency.

Based on social actions, Trump tops Clinton across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, despite Clinton posting nearly 2x as much content on these platforms. Instagram was the only platform where Trump posted more content than Clinton. One could argue that the below ranking doesn’t depict sentiment, so LiftMetrix dove deeper to see how much of their social actions were solely likes, and again Trump came out on top except on Twitter where he and Clinton were neck-and-neck on likes (1.2M).

However, like any truly socially-focused brand, the candidates should have set goals for what their social strategies should be accomplishing beyond just social actions. Trump and Clinton should include links in their social posts to encourage clicks to website pages where they can capture emails, subscribers, voter commitments and information, donations, etc. Therefore, we took it one step further and analyzed the Top 10 most socially engaged posts on each platform for each candidate to see how many drove the user to an optimized site where voters can take an action. The chart below depicts how many of each candidate’s Top 10 posts drove further action beyond the social post.

From their respective top 30 posts (top 10 from each Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), Clinton had 3x more posts driving to a site compared to Trump. Clinton’s main calls to action were for her social users to visit hillaryclinton.com/makeaplan/, hillaryclinton.com/locateand IWillVote.com to look up where voters’ polls are and receive more information; whereas Trump’s were only on Facebook and included links to “Be a Voter” at http://www.Vote.GOP and www.DonaldJTrump.com/DrainTheSwamp where voters could contribute.

The majority of Trump’s top content were short sentences focused on his arguments, “Crooked” Hillary, and his campaign slogan, indicating that he wanted to motivate his audience to respond with reactions and comments, and not to take any further action.

So, perhaps tonight’s election results will show whether one candidate’s social strategy of driving social actions is actually an indicator of votes, or if the other candidate’s social strategy of pushing her voters to take an action was, in fact, the right strategy.

In the meantime, download LiftMetrix’s recent presentation “Is Social Driving Your Business Objectives?” to find out how you can use social to drive business objectives by clicking here,

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Posted by Kara