Tim Hudak’s Facebook Fan page is the hottest leader-hangout (so far) in the Ontario election. Not because he has more fans (15,857) than any other Ontario party leader (McGuinty 5,462, Horwath 4,885 and Schreiner 367), but because his page is getting an average of 124 comments per post. Wow! Granted not all comments are positive. This includes a large collection of sarcastic remarks about the professional and obviously posed photographs of Mr. Hudak and his family on an outing at a surprisingly empty park.
By the way, don’t judge social media success by the number of Facebook Fan Page likes or Twitter followers, but by how engaged (hopefully positively) the community is.
Besides posting lots of great multimedia content that’s well captioned and tagged, Mr. Hudak’s campaign team is doing a lot to engage page visitors by including quick polls. Not surprisingly, most content is carefully crafted and on message.
One more smart thing they’ve done… the profile photo has a “lower third” identifying the party (though the text is cut off). This is the kind of thing that becomes identifiable, like the digital lawn signs I talk about, and should be on all the social media profiles of all candidates and PC party supporters. Grade: B+
I’m not so impressed by Dalton McGuinty’s page. First of all, the profile picture his team selected is terrible (my opinion). It looks stiff and void of personality — like many of the official videos presented on the default section of the page. Perhaps if the writing were less clunky, there might be a greater level of engagement on the page. Grade: C-
Andrea Horwath and her campaign team have the personal tone down pat. Skimming through the updates on her Facebook Fan Page, I felt as though I was catching up on a friend’s profile. It’s surprising, then, that engagement is so low, even if you consider the number of updates over the last seven days (76 updates, 2 comments per post). The profile picture is great. I wonder what would happen if the campaign team cut back on content and stepped up calls for engagement. Grade: B-
Mike Schreiner seems to be using his Facebook Fan Page as yet another channel to publish official releases. There’s nothing engaging about that which is reflected in the numbers. Unlike their federal counterparts, it seems the Ontario Green Party’s doesn’t “get” the social web. Grade: F
All analysis was performed using Sysomos MAP.
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