The 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and audience interaction

Description

Social networking sites offer a lot of opportunities to organize and optimize the political campaign. These sites are also helpful to raise funds for the political campaign and to persuade voters. Presidential candidates use social media as a means of their presidential campaign. The goal of this study is to investigate the strategies of a political campaign which are used by candidates on their social networking sites, and reactions that candidates received from their audiences. Mixed methodology is used to collect, analyze, and mix both quantitative and qualitative data. For quantitative data collection and analysis, Quintly, a platform for social media data collection and analytics, is used. The qualitative data are collected from the candidates social networking sites directly. The content analysis of the candidates’ social media messages followed by an eclectic coding system that has two cycles of data, the first cycle data comes from TagCrowd, an online word visualization tool while the second cycle data involves similar codes and themes that emerged from the first cycle data. The study found that the social networking sites have become the main tool for political campaign communication. An effective usage of social networking sites in the presidential campaign helped candidates to attract more audiences and received more interactions. Candidates also need specific types of social media usages to optimize usages of social networking sites., Copyrights are retained by the author. Please contact Zahedur Arman for further use of this material.