What I learned about an effective social media strategy from my time on the Dini for Hoboken campaign.

Social media is an incredibly important campaigning tool to reach a broad audience and effectively convey a candidate's ideals and platform. However, in order for social media messaging to be effective it must be intricately planned out. I contributed to Dini's digital planning through helping create a social media calendar. First, I centered on the key values and pillars that shape Dini's campaign, and then I made them each a weekly theme. Because of this, in a given week, all posts on several different platforms would be coordinated and push forth an aligned and specific message. For example, one of Dini’s main goals was to preserve Historic Hoboken and so that was one of the first weekly themes I put on the calendar. On Monday, I outlined an introduction to this topic through Dini posting a reel where she speaks briefly on the importance of preserving Historic Hoboken. Then, after the audience had been introduced to this topic, I added that a couple days later an email should be sent out on how local businesses are the heart of Hoboken. This included Dini’s favorite small businesses and some photos of Dini supporting small businesses. Demonstrating the importance of small businesses was crucial because a lot of these would be removed if Historic Hoboken was destroyed. Finally, we ended the week with an invitation to an event at the Hoboken Historic Society and an organization called With Funds For a Better Waterfront. It is important to note that although all of the posts aligned with the concept of preserving Historic Hoboken, they were all on different platforms and utilized different ways of contacting individuals. I learned that this is incredibly important in social media strategy because if you dont use a wide breadth of platforms, you may not reach the most amount of people possible. For example, if an individual does not have Instagram but does frequently check their emails, it is important that we don't just post on Instagram so that this individual is properly targeted by the campaign. However, you don't want to overdo posts or outreach on a specific platform - spamming someone's inbox with emails will be far less effective than less frequent quality posts. In fact, posting to much on any platform may annoy someone interested in the campaign, distorting their view of a given candidate.