On social media, Bloomberg and Trump are fighting two very different fights

[RandySF]

An aide to Bloomberg’s campaign told the New York Times’s Taylor Lorenz that the campaign was “trying to be innovative with how we’re translating the campaign message on social, trying to do it how the Internet actually works.” Simply tweeting from the main campaign Twitter account was “a very 2008 strategy."

In the abstract, perhaps, but the campaign is clearly aiming for something a bit more current than that. Its tweets have attracted a great deal of attention simply by virtue of how weird they are. One featured a gingerbread man dancing on Trump's shoulder as the president addressed his acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial — a tweet that would not have been the norm in 2008.

Bloomberg’s strategy here is, in part, simply to draw attention to his campaign’s willingness to engage in social media in different ways that hopefully demonstrate unexpected savvy (as well as the candidate’s deep pockets).

A tweet like the gingerbread man one is “not good for individually convincing 100,000 people that Mike Bloomberg should be the president,” New York magazine’s Brian Feldman wrote this month. “However, it is very good at convincing pundits and politicians watching the race closely that Mike Bloomberg is making weird tweets to try and appeal to young voters.” It is, in a sense, a flexing of muscles, an electability play in an electability election.

This isn’t what Trump is doing. His team is also resource-heavy, much more because of robust fundraising than the candidate’s willingness to dip into his bank account. (It’s likely that Bloomberg has more liquid cash than Trump both because Trump’s wealth is heavily invested in real estate and because, well, Bloomberg is far richer.) So far, Trump’s reelection campaign is deploying the strategy that helped him win the White House: saturating Facebook with iterations of different ads aimed heavily at promoting that robust fundraising.

Bloomberg’s message doesn’t need to be concerned about fundraising, allowing his campaign to focus on promoting the candidate. The team has been ramping up spending on Facebook ads, spending up to 10 times what Trump’s campaign is spending in recent days. The effect isn’t only to spread Bloomberg’s message but also to drown out Trump’s message. When someone goes to a page where a Facebook ad will be shown, there’s a behind-the-scenes, automated auction to determine what ad is shown. Facebook balances what an advertiser wants to spend with what a user wants to see to decide what ad is shown. If you are willing to spend more, you can influence what ends up in front of the potential customer/voter.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/13/social-media-bloomberg-trump-are-fighting-two-very-different-fights/

[Iliyah]

1. Bloomberg is sure kicking shithole ass . . .

and it's funny.