Republicans are using Facebook in unprecedented ways (with vote.gop)

By Allan Smith, BusinessInsider.com

The Republican National Committee has made a big push on Facebook in the closing months of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

And it could have an even greater effect in a post-2016 landscape.

Two RNC officials outlined to Business Insider the committee’s increased focus on using Facebook to push a “Get Out To Vote” effort. The endeavor is critical to Trump’s campaign as it has outsourced its data operation to the RNC.

The effort to help drive the vote is coming at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising. For example, the cost-per-action of getting someone to both register to vote and request an absentee ballot through the latest Facebook push is roughly $24. The cost-per-action of doing so using traditional media is almost 10 times greater, at roughly $200 for both.

The Facebook strategy being deployed by the RNC works as such: potential voters are split into three groups. One group receives ads that are testing the effectiveness of video length, format, and author. The second group receives ads with varying messages. The third group receives the most effective ads based on the data from the first two groups. The tests are run twice weekly, and at the end of the week, the audience is scrambled so to be placed into a different grouping.

The committee called it their strategy for buying persuasion.

And the massive amount of data returned on Facebook, which the committee admits is much more substantial than the information they’re able to draw from traditional advertising, will have a big impact on how much they’re going to be spending on their Facebook push in the future.

The ads being run through the remainder of the campaign are for vote.gop, a party get out the vote resource. Users who engage are then provided with the chance to fill out a form to either register to vote or for an absentee ballot, where still able to do so based on state election laws.

The RNC is then able to push out future ads based on what stage of completion the voter is at. For example, if the voter fully fills out the absentee ballot request, they’ll get ads asking them to make sure they turn it in. Once the ballot is turned in to the state’s secretary of state, the RNC won’t push ads out to the voter.

With one week until Election Day, polls have begun to tighten, underscoring the importance of each candidate’s get out to vote effort.

Read the full article at: http://clk.gop/DWAHRD

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