At the Libertarian Party of Ohio, we occasionally get emails, calls and letters from our membership complaining about some of the memes run on our social media pages. And from time to time, we run controversial memes. Many readers prefer serious, thoughtful, and in-depth articles and posts that reflect a professional presentation of solutions to the complex issues of the day.
However, memes get more attention and help build our page traffic ratings. It increases followers and ultimately, builds party membership. As a matter of fact, a significant portion of our fundraising and event participation is a direct result of social media channels – mostly, Facebook.
While we run many, we’d prefer to run more links to serious articles. In fact, we are actively building our own materials and encouraging participation from many talented writers in our state on this website. But the Facebook algorithms won’t our messages into people’s feed without a balance of posts – including memes.
Yes, we take some guff for it. But it draws in the audience and even when a meme isn’t tasteful or is even “off the Libertarian rails,” it offers our members a chance to call out over-simplified thinking. Often, we learn more by being wrong or picking the wrong side of a battle – memes make that easy! Ironically, it’s usually when we run a mindless or controversial meme that upsets our readers that drives the most traffic! So, please call out the inconsistencies in the memes and present a better point of view!
We encourage our readers to challenge all assumptions and become part of the discussion. Besides, we are still looking for the Libertarian we can all agree with!
More importantly, our focus for social media is to get important news and event information published without spending a lot of advertising money. However, anything that looks like a promotion for an event, donation or an LPO Store product doesn’t appear on the feed of even our most ardent readers. Even links to other pages and articles aren’t pushed into our followers’ news feeds as we’d prefer. But memes get spread and help spread other articles in their wake. It isn’t that we blame Facebook for capitalizing on their service – it’s a matter of economy for a volunteer-based party that isn’t supported by big-money interests.
There truly are links to important articles on serious issues in our posts, but the follower must go look for them instead of waiting till they are filtered on their news feed. Each follower also has some control over how much they see from our page by changing the setting to “See First” to see all the news as well as to see events to circumvent some of these defaults.
We welcome and encourage participation with our social media. When you see a good article, send it to us. When you see something you like, like it, comment on it and if you really like it, share it. The more traffic that we get on the good articles, the more our focus will shift. It really does become an issue of supply and demand.
For those wanting to help build traffic, there is nothing better than a lot of comments and sharing. Feel free to scroll past the memes.
You can also subscribe or visit the Party’s official website for issues and events where memes aren’t posted. Another alternative is to scroll through some of our County pages – each of them has a flavor as unique as the contributing libertarians across the state. Some focus on issues, some on politics, and some are meme-heavy.
We have a terrific social media director, Kelli Rodin, who studies these social media algorithms, which change at just about the time she figures them out! She has worked hard to build our page traffic which just surpassed the 14,000 like mark! More importantly, we are nearing an all-important threshold that will get our posts into even more feeds. Above all, she is an ardent student of the process who welcomes suggestions and ideas on how we can do a better job promoting our principles. She would tell you to keep the comments coming!