Understanding the Social Media Strategies of U.S. Primary Candidates

This paper examines the social media strategies of candidates seeking their party’s nomination for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We use textual analysis to understand what candidates focused on. We assess eight themes covered in Twitter posts. For example, Clinton focused on GUN CONTROL, while Sanders focused on climate change. Using Facebook data, we introduce a topic modeling approach, latent Dirichlet allocation, to the political marketing literature. This allows us to uncover what topics the candidates focus on without researcher intervention and, using a dynamic model, show how this changes over time. We note that Clinton’s focus on Trump increases toward the end of the primary campaign.