Tories Not So Conservative on Facebook

“It was amusing to see all these polls saying, ‘Oh, Labour’s talking to more people’, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘That’s great, because we are talking to the right people, over and over and over again’. Thus said Jim Messina, the Obama campaign guru employed by the Tories during the General Election.

So what did the Conservatives do and how did they know they were talking to the “right people”? They used their considerable war chest to buy targeted ads on Facebook. For example, they targeted women over 40 living in specific geographical areas who had told Facebook that they were concerned about health and education.

They claim that they got even smarter in the marginal seats, but don’t reveal what they did. Our “man on the inside” suspects that the buying in the marginal seats was no more sophisticated, but my guess is that they may have been employing dynamic ads. Whatever they did, it was considerably smarter than the feet-on-the-ground, blunderbuss approach employed by Labour.

It won’t take long for the other parties to cotton on, and by the next election, behavioural targeting on social media will be old news. Even the use of programmatic will have become part of BAU by 2020. It will be interesting to see where political organisations go next and if they will have really embraced the potential of digital to influence the relatively small number of people who can sweep a party to power.

There’s a more complete article about the way the Tories used Facebook on The Times (the full article may be hidden behind a paywall though!)