Just after 11pm on November 6th the tweet went out. It read: “Four more years.” After garnering 816,000 retweets and over 4.5 million likes on Facebook, it has become one of the most searing messages from election night.
In her first interview since President Barack Obama's re-election, Laura Olin, a 31-year-old social media strategist from D.C. who wrote the tweet, spoke about being the voice behind the fifth most-followed account on Twitter. “We always tried to be really human, like speak to people like we’d like to be spoken to, and never go into, you know, ‘speechiness,’” she said of managing @BarackObama. Olin, who joined the Obama campaign in March 2011 as the first digital staffer, also noted the need to create distinct voices for other campaign Twitter handles (@MichelleObama, @JoeBiden) as well as “choosing people for the team who not only were creative—and knew their social media shit—but were really kind of fanatical about fact checking and accuracy.”
Olin, too, stressed the importance of using GIFs as a means reaching a greater audience.
“We recognized early on that when we put up a GIF or reblogged a GIF it would have a better reach than just a static image. It’s just another way to speak in the terms of the community — and make things more fun. This isn’t rocket science at all, but I think something that we discovered — or tried to implement — was that if you put things in terms that people actually want to share, they will share them. Political campaigns historically haven’t totally gotten it.”
[via Storyboard]
