Social media campaigning flops

By Nina Ong

In the 2016 presidential campaign, many candidates have used social media campaigning to their advantage. Candidates, such as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have used this method of campaigning to appeal to voters. Most voters that have viewed or heard of their campaign on social media are younger voters. In the voter registration speech by David Shively, he noted that most candidates for political positions tend to ignore the younger voters in favor of the statistically larger voter rate of the older voters.

For the 2016 ALA Cornhusker Girls State, delegates were allowed to post on a forum in the blog’s campaign section. Most delegates did not use the social media campaigning to their advantage. On the third day of Girls State, a handful of delegates posted to the designated forum. They were allowed to post who they are, their location in Sandoz and a slogan if they had one. Delegate Roni Miller used the forum to show citizens why she should elected to office. Most of the girls kept to the format the media staff suggested.

All in all, social media campaigning struggled to make an impact in its first year. The campaign section on the blog only saw a measly 175 views after a good portion of the third day of Girls State. Considering the fact that there were about 400 girls, one might assume that most people felt that this way of campaigning was pointless or did not find a huge need to campaign online. It is possible that many citizens did not know much about how they were supposed to campaign online.

When the Twitter hashtag was searched, some girls tweeted about their campaign. Campaigning on other sites besides the Cornhusker Girls State Blog was frowned upon, but most girls probably did not know about the blog. Hopefully, next year’s social media campaign will be a lot more popular, but a good outcome would include opening the campaign to other social media sites. Otherwise, the only efficient way to keep social media campaigning in Girls State is to make an actual forum instead of having delegates post one comment about themselves and their campaign.