Political content spreads faster than commercial brand content online: New Research

As politics decide your future, it is imminent that political content spreads faster than commercial brand content.

An online field study research shows that people watch political content more than they watch and share advertising or brand content. The usage of social media for political communication as well as advertising is on an all time high with the widespread reach of internet to people on a personal level. Digital advertising technology company Social Vibe on Thursday, released findings from the study that show the efficacy of engagement advertising with political messages.

The findings are included in a white paper by SocialVibe CEO Jay Samit called, All Politics is Social: Social Media Engagement Will Decide Election 2012. The paper also highlights best practices in digital communications for political campaigns, said a press release.

Voters are hungry for sharable content that resonates with their values, priorities and interests, said Mr. Samit. The communications challenges facing campaigns are even more complex than the marketing challenges faced by all brands; once campaign season is in full swing, it takes creativity and ingenuity to break through the noise of non-stop political ads. By providing engaging content that people want to share with their friends, engagement advertising overcomes those barriers, he said.

The study was conducted in May 2011, to test the reach of politically-themed engagement advertising campaigns. People on Facebook who live in Iowa were invited to participate in the engagement through SocialVibe's value-exchange platform. As a result, 94 percent who engaged with the political message watched the entire message, and nearly 40 percent of participants shared the engagement with Facebook friends, which is more than twice the average share rate for SocialVibe's typical online brand campaign. SocialVibe found that as little as a $25,000 investment in an engagement campaign could spread online to people of voting age in all 50 states within 24 hours.

Campaigns that embrace the latest trends in commercial brand advertising will see the same kind of results that are driving more and more advertising dollars both online and to mobile devices, continued Mr. Samit. Engagement advertising provides a tremendous bang for the buck. It has the power to reach a national audience for pennies on the dollar compared to broadcast advertising. If a presidential candidate launched a similar engagement to that of our field study, voters around the country would be seeing his or her message delivered directly to them - by someone they know - at a time when they are ready to focus on what the ad has to say.

SocialVibe is a digital advertising technology company that provides engagement advertising for brands as well as issue-based and candidate political campaigns.