David Jones, Adam Brierley and Will Harris: Fighting back via Facebook in Fylde

David Jones is the Chairman of Fylde Conservative Association (FCA) and a former parliamentary candidate. Adam Brierley is FCA’s Deputy Chairman Political. Will Harris is Fylde’s digital campaigns officer.

This year’s local elections were a harrowing affair for Conservative Associations across the country. Despite all the hard work of local teams, thousands of doors knocked, multitudes of leaflets delivered, and a litany of difficult doorstep debates, capable, hardworking Conservative candidates failed to win or hold their seats. Coming less than a year since the party’s worst-ever general election performance, it would have been all too easy for local associations and activists to become dejected, dispirited, and demoralised.

Up here in Fylde (the only constituency in Lancashire with a Conservative MP), we were not immune from the losses the party suffered in the county council elections. However, as we performed our own post-mortem on the local campaign, we were delighted to uncover a major reason to be cheerful. During the 90 days covering the short campaign and polling day, our association’s Facebook page racked up just over one million views.

Although we have always been proud of our digital campaigning skills as an association (and had set ourselves a target of reaching one million views), we are hardly in the same league as Kim Kardashian or Taylor Swift when it comes to reach, audience, or impact. If we can get one million views, other local associations can do it too. We therefore wanted to share, via ConHome, the five digital campaign rules that helped us hit this important milestone.

Content is king

Any social media campaign is dead in the water if it has nothing interesting to say or share. It is therefore vital to post interesting, relevant, and frequent content. Different voices, posting a mix of content (pictures, video, graphics, and even text), keep your audience coming back time and again and make them more likely to share your content more widely.

In addition to commissioning professionally produced videos from a media company, we encouraged candidates to generate their own ‘homemade’ campaign content. Because anyone can create a short video on their phone nowadays, our candidates were able to make their campaigns hyper-local and respond quickly to voters’ concerns. Great issues that we addressed included plans to reopen a local swimming baths, tackling queues at the local tip, and campaigning to save the iconic trees on a local high street.

We found that social media was not only useful in sharing information about our own policies but also great when it came to rapidly rebutting the many myths, fibs, and outright smears our opponents were happy to disseminate. It also enabled more people to identify voters’ concerns and post about what the local Conservative team was doing to address them.

Keeping the local team engaged

A successful social media campaign is always a team effort. The first audience for any local social campaign, before you even think about voters and residents, are association members. They are the people most interested in the posts and the first to comment, share, and repost. They start the cascade of engagement, and their networks of followers and friends are how your Facebook content begins to reach the ultimate audience, existing and potential Conservative voters.

Our campaign was helped enormously by our local MP, Andrew Snowden, who is not only an incredibly energetic campaigner and great at rallying the troops, but also generates great content himself, both in Parliament and in the constituency, which we were able to share alongside national campaign messaging created by CCHQ.

An active, well-directed local campaign

All successful campaigns, whether digital or analogue, require direction and momentum. It was therefore important that the association’s executive prioritised our digital efforts as a major pillar of the local campaign. This not only meant allocating resources but also exhorting (and, at times, imploring) candidates to post content and planning to ensure that content was created and shared at a steady pace. Every time a team went out leafletting, whether it was a sole activist or a team a dozen strong, they were strongly encouraged to share a photo, ideally featuring a street name or landmark.

Obviously, our local election campaign was about more than just Facebook (and it was vital to get the other, more traditional elements of our campaign right too), but our digital campaign was an important pillar of our efforts to hold Reform at bay.

Getting the right mix of earned and unearned activity

Earned and organic coverage can get you a long way but let us not pretend that some paid promotion does not help. It ensures your best content gets the audience it deserves, which in turn helps grow the organic audience for future posts. Paid promotion need not break the bank. We spent £1,277.53 during the local elections to promote and push out key content. Given the local electorate is just over 75,000, that is just under 2p per potential voter.

Lots, and lots, and lots of trial and error

Most local associations are not populated with digital natives, let alone seasoned social media mavens. So, any digital campaign you mount is going to be a learning curve for those involved, and a fair amount of trial and error is inevitable. Some training in what and how to post helps build confidence, but there is no substitute for experience. Once candidates and activists get used to creating videos about local issues or simply posting pictures of themselves out campaigning, there is no stopping them. The association is easily able to convey all that natural dynamism and commitment to the electorate.

It is something of a cliché to observe that the perfect is the enemy of the good. This is particularly true when it comes to social media content. What you post does not have to be perfect, polished, or professional; it is much better that it is timely, honest, and authentic.

We really hope that local associations across the country can learn from our efforts (and many errors), utilise these tips, and create their own campaigning success stories. We encourage anyone, chairman, officer, or activist, to contact us in Fylde if they would like to discuss our campaign in more detail or, better still, to share their own tips and tricks with us.

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