Trump’s social media strategy

Following the assassination attempt last week, there is talk that Trump will most likely win the US presidential election to be held at the end of this year. Indeed, immediately after the moment he was shot, while being taken to a safe place by his security detail from the platform where he was speaking, he turned to those who had come to watch the meeting, raised his fist in the air, and sent messages that he would continue the fight. The fact that he did not lose his composure even in that difficult, shocking moment and was able to deliver messages to rally his base was very interesting and significant in terms of political communication. 

Immediately afterward, we saw Elon Musk’s tweets supporting Trump on the X platform. As of today, Musk has more than 190 million followers and is also one of the most influential phenomena on social media. A thought leader. 

Trump’s election in 2016 was largely met with surprise, but with the Cambridge Analytica scandal that broke in 2018, it was understood that it was not that much of a surprise. Some things had happened in plain sight. 

Steven Levy, in his book titled Facebook, describes these events in breathtaking detail with a fast-paced flow. As we all know now, reaching the American voter through social media had become a preferred and successfully implemented method since the Obama era. 

However, in the 2016 elections, Hillary Clinton made a strategic mistake, in my opinion, by choosing to use traditional media instead of taking advantage of this experience for her election campaign, treating social media as “a freak tool that had not yet proven itself,” in Levy’s words. In fact, when the company offered to provide guidance to the Clinton team on how to run a campaign on Facebook, they turned it down and failed to understand what kind of opportunity this was.

They had set aside a small budget for Facebook. One of the advertisements they shot with this budget was a 2.5-minute mini-documentary that appealed more to women. Because this ad appealed more to women, the Facebook algorithm directed it to female users. Due to the auction-based advertising systems used by Facebook, advertisers were directing the ads to be published to the people most likely to want to see them in order to achieve their goals. In this case, since the target audience consisted only of women, the cost was much lower. However, the Clinton team wanted this ad to be shown to both women and men, even though it would put an extra burden on the budget. But when they did so, they were “trying to reach people who did not want to watch this ad by paying more money.” 

On the other hand, although Trump’s team was inexperienced with Facebook at first, they quickly learned the medium and brought in an unknown website designer named Brad Parscale to head the digital campaign. Parscale realized that traditional campaign methods would be insufficient for a candidate who was outside the mainstream, and that the tools Facebook used for micro-targeting and the free consulting services it offered could be used to close the gap between Trump and his opponent. He accepted the professional guidance service offered by Facebook to all major advertisers, and thus, many Facebook employees began giving almost full-time advice to the Trump team so they could get maximum efficiency from their advertising spending.

In fact, Trump’s campaign team was working closely with Facebook to reduce the resolution of a problem encountered to 30 seconds. Clinton’s campaign team, on the other hand, had to send an email or make a phone call to solve the same problem and then wait a few days for the issue to be resolved. 

Levy includes a very important detail at this point: “In Trump’s campaign, every ad was treated like an experiment, and each experiment was meticulously examined to determine which groups were interested in which ads. They would take Trump’s speeches where he challenged his opponent, break them into 15-second segments, and show different segments to different demographic groups. Facebook would republish the segments that received engagement, and those that did not were discarded. Thus, there were thousands of different video creations belonging to Trump and algorithms testing an almost infinite number of variables behind each one.

For example, there were times when 175,000 different versions of an ad were used within the same day. Thanks to the Facebook tools used to make the ads engaging, they were directed to groups called Custom Audiences. Thanks to custom audiences, advertisers could separate specific groups from others by mixing features such as gender, race, residence, and religion with interests (BMW owners, gun enthusiasts, etc.). Once it was determined that a group was particularly suitable for Trump propaganda, the campaign team used a tool called Lookalike Audiences to target other communities that did not openly support Trump but were likely to do so. The pioneers of this strategy, known as 'nurturing' or 'brand lift,' were those who worked on the Obama campaign.” 

The work did not end there: “They were working with multiple agencies that were competing with each other to get the best possible Facebook ads. Each of these agencies would start work at 6 a.m., launch a campaign in a new region, and by noon, they would identify the ad that yielded the best results and allocate the budget to that ad. The agency that created the best ad would take the money, and the losers would head to a different population region the next day to try to win the prize.” 

If they encountered groups that were unlikely to vote for Trump, “they would try to discourage them from voting against Trump by showing them anti-Hillary ads. They had identified three groups that would not vote for Trump under any circumstances: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.” These groups were shown anti-Hillary ads and were attempted to be discouraged from voting. 

As a result of all this, they had gained a very valuable experience. “When the campaign ended, the Trump team had a resource consisting of data on age, gender, region, and other demographic characteristics, as well as which messages resonated with which communities.” 

Facebook, which realized this situation late, was concerned that “politicians wanted to use the site’s targeting infrastructure to give different messages to different groups (for example, this message was about immigration for some, jobs for others, and military power for others). Messages supporting immigrants could be given to one region, while anti-immigrant messages could be given to another. This was a very attractive idea for politicians. It had become so crazy that they would run a campaign in a region where Trump was going to give a speech beforehand to determine which issues appealed to the people in that region. Then, like marketing, they would reorganize the speech Trump was going to give in real-time.” 

We also saw after the Cambridge Analytica scandal that all these messages directed at voters revealed a situation that entered the literature as 'post-truth'. 

Trump, who gave a quite sensational example of how social media can be used in an election campaign, actually used this experience while surviving the assassination attempt he experienced. According to experts who examined the video of the moment he was shot, while he was showing the audience a graph emphasizing the increase in immigration in the country during his speech, he turned his head to look at the graph, and the bullet that was supposed to hit his head grazed his ear. 

On the other hand, Elon Musk, the owner of the X platform, showed his support by sharing the now-iconic photo of Trump with his fist raised in the air. Moreover, he attacked the traditional media, as he often does, by sharing visuals in his tweet showing that mainstream media and national newspapers reported the news as 'Trump fell during his speech,' without mentioning the assassination or the injury. 

Trump is very experienced and at an advantage regarding which message to give to which voter. His opponent, Biden, has remained more traditional. However, the situation was the exact opposite in the Obama campaign. Perhaps partly because of this, we see that opinions in favor of another candidate emerging are heard more frequently. As a result, the side that uses social media better will largely win the US presidential election again.