Barack Obama, the re-elected US President as of Tuesday morning has proven to be the sort of person that likes to tweet, like, share, post, tag and everything in between. Obviously you won’t be finding photos of him clubbing or Instagram-ing his Sunday roast dinner, but Barack Obama is likely to be the first major political leader to take full advantage of the abilities of social media.
For example, in the 2008 Presidential Electorial Campaign, Obama secured himself a vast online presence through social media by actively blogging over all platforms which allowed him to connect to the people of America, other than on the traditional television set or on the radio. There are a large majority of people out there that on average spend near enough 6 hours a day in front of the computer screen and rightfully so, social media campaigning is a vital strategy to achieve your goals through viral networking. Results being, Obama had himself more “friends” and “followers” on social media networks than rival John McCain, and guess who won? And guess who won again?
Obama’s Facebook & Twitter Profiles
In 2007 Obama’s Presidential Campaign Team created the Facebook account and it wasn’t until 365 days and $643,000 later (Facebook advertising costs), he gained himself 1,000,000 followers. An expensive price to pay considering the use of the site is free, but looking at the image above I think we can say that he has done extremely well to win himself over 32,000,000 followers 4 years later…”Alright, Mr. Popular.” says Jan Pleva, one of our web designers.
On the Twitter side of things, Obama is all about flooding our news feed with information and thoughts on how to run America. With over 22,000,000 followers and only following 670,000 others, he’s quite the attention seeker when we look at the ratio. And why shouldn’t he be? I’m sure he wouldn’t be particularly interested in seeing how me and my fellow pals decided to go to Thorpe Park last weekend and how much of a fun time we had – anyway, that’s besides the point.
Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, spotify(?), YouTube & Flickr are just a few more social networking sites President Obama likes to use. He has definitely covered all bases, although I am slightly confused to why he has advertised his Spotify profile on his website.
You mentioned his website…
www.barackobama.com – I can hardly say that it is the most imaginative neither is it the most impressive website in the world, but it does give you an easy insight to his Presidential lifestyle.
Usually, you would expect the website for the President of the United States of America to be made of gold, to have lasers and eye-scanning technology allowing you access to the ‘Contact Us’ page, but simply it is just a blog. The www.barackobama.com website is actually run by one of the three co-founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes so this would somewhat explain the reasoning behind the ‘blog’ concept – and the interlinking between this site and all the social media profiles working alongside it.
So, how important is social media?
From this evidence, we can happily confirm that social media does work, and social media is a major contribution to marketing any person or business. All web design agencies have been saying this for years, and continuously we strive to emphasise on the importance of this online world and how to interact with it. So, whether you are looking to become the next President or starting up your own business; remember to tweet, tag, share, like, poke, wink, add, post and even ‘lol’ if you are genuinely laughing out loud.
