Beating the Facebook Algorithm to Win Over Voters
Services
Expertise
Priorities USA needed a new digital strategy that would beat back the challenges posed by Facebook’s algorithm to engage and mobilize supporters.
Situation
Priorities USA, a voter-centric progressive organization, needed to effectively harness Facebook to reach like-minded voters with engaging content in the months prior to the 2018 midterm elections. Priorities turned to Precision for help in developing an innovative digital ad strategy that would reach, engage, and mobilize supporters.
Approach
We developed a first-of-its-kind Facebook ads program to navigate the decline in organic social reach and model how routine content promotion on digital platforms should be standard operating procedure for campaigns: gaining daily exposure to campaign messages to fill the organic void, increasing the value of existing supporters by generating reach through post shares, and generating insights as to what type of content works best at mobilizing progressives to take action. We promoted over 120 organic posts, each aimed at testing the shareability of different calls-to-action, graphic styles, and content themes. We compared the efficacy of various targeting methods to reach our target audience, from direct voter file data to Facebook’s in-platform targeting data.
Result
The campaign reached more than 1.3 million unique users in three months and drove 17K post shares, helping to drive Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms. Content optimizations made possible by these insights enabled us to increase the share rate by 3x over the course of the campaign. The pilot demonstrated the power of routine content promotion.
