A Year of Engaging Latinos on Social Media to Promote Civic Participation: What We Did and What Work
Answering questions in real time, hyper localizing content and promoting user-generated interactions are all strategies that can be tapped in the future for campaigns to battle misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccines and start building momentum to get Latinos to vote in the midterms.
Univision’s GOTV nonpartisan “Vota Conmigo” campaign and the census “Cuenta conmigo” campaign, both led by the company’s CSR team, had clear goals since their conception.
For the voting campaign, the objective was to get eligible Latino citizens to register to vote, get them to the polls and help them make more informed decisions while also explaining an electoral system that many find complex and intimidating. The census campaign aimed to motivate Hispanics in the United States, regardless of immigration status, to participate in the 2020 Census by providing tangible examples of the community and personal impact of filling out the questionnaire.
Both campaigns were a remarkable cross-functional effort that required alignment and collaboration between every team at the company — from linear (network, local and radio), product, analytics and engineering to editorial and marketing, the creative network of influencers, and more. On top of all that, they also combined efforts with external partners.
They also faced several unprecedented challenges, given the nature of the pandemic and the profound changes it caused in every aspect of our society.
When COVID-19 hit in the spring of 2020, entire outreach mediums were lost overnight: Site-based registration and door-to-door canvassing, so critical for registering Latino voters, weren’t a viable option anymore. Phone banks and knock-on-door efforts, vital to answering questions about the census, were limited too.
Suddenly, it was clear that social media and digital efforts were going to be pivotal for any attempt to make the 32 million eligible Latinos in the nation to show up and vote, and to motivate the almost 60 million Hispanics living in the United States to fill out out the census, when roughly one in three live in hard-to-count census tracts.
The pandemic didn’t start the digital overconsumption, but it undeniably accelerated it.
Preliminary data confirmed this. The COVID-19 outbreak motivated the growth of live video, and, as early as March, as countries started implementing stay-at-home orders, Statista reported a 21 percent uptick in monthly social media usage. Online searches and social media also became the most important sources overall when it came to information about COVID-19, according to a study done by Shareablee.
This trend was especially true for U.S. Hispanics, considering that even before the pandemic, they were at the forefront of technology adoption, and over-indexing in social media and video consumption and smartphone ownership, according to Nielsen.
In the end, our GOTV digital campaign ended up with 43 million impressions made across all our social media platforms and 38 million total video views. We consolidated brand awareness (people searched online for Vota Conmigo while looking for specific answers on voting) and set a benchmark for future conversion campaigns. And the #CuentaConmigo hashtag reached 3.7 million people, with over 3,600 posts published with the hashtag on Univision’s social media platforms, just in one week, which we called “Census Week: United we Count!”
How did we do it? These are the main strategies that worked.
Clearly define the target audiences
Latinos are frequently treated as a homogeneous group. However, before beginning to draw any strategy, it was vital to consider how our diverse communities’ economic, cultural, racial and social dimensions intersected with civic participation.
Very early on, we identified key subsets among our target audiences. For voting, one was Latino youth who were turning 18 and becoming eligible to vote. We Are Mitu referred to them as the 200 percent: “youth who are 100 percent American and 100 percent Latino.” We spent a fair amount of time strategizing about how to engage with this group, which ended up being crucial to the overall turnout success. In this election, more than 1.7 million young Latinos (ages 18–29) voted early, an increase of 313 percent from 2016, according to NALEO, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that facilitates Latino participation in the American political process. In several pieces of our digital campaign, this group ended up rendering 87 percent of total clicks to the site and 82 percent of total impressions.
Another group we made sure to cater tailored content to were Latina women, a subset with exponential potential to grow that had been characterized as “voters sitting on the sidelines.” And Latinas did emerge: Preliminary numbers by Catalist from voting information, not polls, showed that Latina working-class voters without a college education cast more than 1.8 million early votes in 2020 compared to 589,000 early ballots in 2016. In our digital campaign, females had the highest conversion rate throughout all online events: mail-in and online registration.
We also closely studied the peculiarities, idiosyncrasies and challenges in states with significant populations of Latino voters, like Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas and Georgia and North Carolina, where Latino communities are fast-growing.
For the census campaign, we researched the many characteristics that make Latinos hard to count, including language barriers or concerns about data confidentiality. Confusion, distrust, and fears over racism and immigration status have already reduced participation in the census by those in immigrant communities. We specifically paid attention to local research that showed that many of the cities with large Hispanic populations historically had below the national response rates: New York, New York; Phoenix, Arizona; Dallas, Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada; Los Ángeles, California; and Alburquerque, New México.
This helped us decide on the optimal granularity for target segmentation, the best content formats and the best online distribution channels for each piece of content.
Encourage user generated content
For the voting campaign, we created a set of 35 animated virtual stickers, aiming to increase user-generated content (UGC), which had a resurgence during the lockdown; heighten audience affinity to the campaign; and promote engagement.
The stickers featured expressions like: “I vote,” “I vote by mail” and “I already registered to vote” in an illustration style that simulated real stickers and was connected with calls to action. You could find them on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and text messaging platforms such as Messenger and WhatsApp.
The stickers ended up being one of the most successful components of the campaign. In the first 24 hours, just one sticker gathered 20 million views in Giphy and was highlighted on the website’s homepage because of the high engagement.
We extended the stickers concept for the last stretch of the voting campaign and leaned into augmented reality lenses. Those pieces generated 40,000 interactions in the week before the election. This time, we couldn’t rely on words because of platform restrictions, so we created scenes where people could interact with objects such as a virtual voting booth and a mailbox. The goal was to get people to connect with our brand and encourage them to amplify our messaging proudly.
A recent study by experiential agency Momentum Worldwide supports the notion that audiences have an appetite for experiences, and social media is a perfect canvas to provide those. In a 2017 study by Harris Poll, about a third of millennials who use graphic items like stickers and emojis shared that images communicate their thoughts better than words, so it makes sense to invest in these formats for civic engagement campaigns.
Blend local and national content
In our aim to create the most useful content possible to flip citizens from “non-voters” or “not counted” to “voters” or “counted,” we leaned into local content. Research shows that localized messages are more effective in promoting civic participation. Local content also keeps the audience’s focus on their communities, which also tends to be a source of motivation to get to the polls or fill out the census form.
For the voting campaign alone, we created more than 225 animations localized for all of Univision’s markets (over 120 combined television and radio stations, plus 89 affiliates, with their own social media accounts).
To accomplish this, we took advantage of the “hamburger method” for scriptwriting. Each script had an introduction (top bun), the internal or supporting information (the filling), and the conclusion (bottom bun). For every video, the buns stayed the same. But the filling had specific details that corresponded to a particular state.
For both census and GOTV efforts, we also set up more than 150 national and local landing pages, and we doubled down on SEO efforts by analyzing local search terms.
Ask questions
The most effective tool that we found last year to connect with our audience on social media was streamlining live videos and asking for comments and participation in real time.
This makes sense, because, in the U.S., the streaming audience saw massive growth in 2020. Instagram Live usage grew by 70 percent, Facebook use by nearly 40 percent and YouTube by 20 percent just in the first month of lockdown, according to Ogilvy. And afterwards, as stated by Shareablee, month over month, the U.S. streaming audience grew 23 percent across all platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube). And, on average, watch time for live video is eight times longer than that of video-on-demand.
Since the beginning of the quarantine, Univision’s CSR team has streamed more than 100 Facebook Lives with video views in the hundreds of thousands and an average engagement four times the industry benchmark.
In live transmissions, our anchors would ask questions and respond to comments alongside experts. These streams also helped us amplify the voices of Latino leaders and organizations working on civic engagement. For example, María Teresa Kumar of Voto Latino, Yadira Sanchez of Poder Latinx and Frankie Miranda de Hispanic Federation spoke about the significance of the Latino vote, Héctor Sánchez Barba of Mi Familia Vota answered questions on how to vote, Clarissa Martinez de Castro from Unidos US spoke about voting for the first time. Jointly with Twitter Alas, we answered Latinos’ most frequently asked questions about voting. And, because Latinos are neither single-issue voters nor a monolithic bloc, these transmissions didn’t shy away from topics such as women’s inequality, reproductive rights, climate issues, access to healthcare and how voting connected with them, and that paid off in terms of viewership, engagement and comments.
Iterate non-stop
Although it’s essential to have a clear timeline of deliverables, it’s even more important to remain flexible and adapt the overall strategy based on key metrics such as traffic volumes, CTA click rates, bounce rates, use of hashtags and post reach, and applause rates (e.g., likes, favorites) relative to our total number of followers, average engagement rates, etc.
Thanks to tools like Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Facebook Insights, Sprout Social, Shareablee, Crowdtangle, Social Baker and A/B trial strategies, we were able to test copy and creatives continually.
For example, we learned early on that in this electoral campaign, videos explaining processes such as how to vote by mail step-by-step generated more engagement and were more in demand than storytelling and emotionally driven content. This contradicted the results that we got in our civic engagement campaign for the midterm elections. Our better-performing video pieces explained things like how to vote safely in COVID times, how to vote early and how voting by mail works.
Use a mix of formats
In both the census and GOTV campaigns, we aimed to meet our audience members where they were. By diversifying into as broad an array of digital mediums and platforms as possible, we better served their needs while maximizing our content’s value.
Early in 2020, HubSpot’s Not Another State of Marketing Report found that video was the second most engaging content type on social media, after photo/imagery. In 2020, we also saw the rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels and the continued engagement on Stories content from Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, so we devoted a big part of our efforts to creating short-form or “snackable” pieces of content and gifs.
We created educational and how to videos, explainer videos, and gifs that got above average engagement and helped us reach new audiences for the census campaign. We also listed our reporters and anchors for Instagram stories that told personal narratives and provided value.
Still, images (illustrations, quote graphics, infographics) also had a big role in our social media strategies, especially around key dates and roadblocks. We adapted image dimensions, hashtag usage, language, caption length and character count for each platform to post content that matches each platform’s audience.
When possible, we also used interactive data visualization, combining statistics and data into easily digestible images and formats, knowing that infographics and similar formats receive more shares than any other type of content on social media. Here is an example of a “how to vote by mail” interactive that we developed for the campaign: univision.com/votaporcorreo.
Address misinformation
Debunking false content and widespread myths have to be a key component of any civic engagement campaign that wants to cut through the noise. Weeks before the election, in a survey done by NALEO, 77 percent of respondents were concerned that family or friends were being sent digitally altered videos meant to mislead the public. And it’s known that Latinos have been saturated with misinformation about the COVID vaccine with hoaxes, rumors, spam, malware, slander or even deep fakes.
Psychological research backs several methods of countering misinformation. One is to debunk incorrect information after it has spread. Another one, more effective according to experts, is inoculating people against false information before they’re exposed — a strategy known as “prebunking,” so when people encounter misinformation later, it no longer sticks.
For both the census and the voting campaign, we devoted time and effort to combat misinformation and help our audience recognize fake news sites, explain how photos that have been manipulated or taken out of context reach social media and go viral, and most importantly, tell them how they can verify the content they consume on their own before sharing it to their networks.
What’s next in promoting civic participation?
As we work toward providing Latinos with vital information on the COVID-19 vaccine or start naturalization campaigns geared toward the midterm elections, it is fundamental to think about the natural progressions for digital civic engagement campaigns. Here are some ideas:
Local and personal
Keep offering content — as Robin Kwong, the newsroom innovation lead at The Wall Street Journal, stated recently to The Drum — “at the right time, to the right people, in the right format.”
Also, increase the use of hyper localization via geotargeting (Facebook and Instagram let you narrow the geographic area of your posts down to a circle as small as one mile in circumference. Digital stickers, messaging and bots can be city-specific).
These strategies could be paired with the development of virtual communities around subjects and areas of common interest. During the COVID-19 crisis, local Facebook groups helped drive support for local businesses affected by the pandemic.
More audio
With the popularity of Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces and the growth of the consumption of podcasts (68 million people in the U.S. listen to podcasts weekly, according to Infinite Dial 20), it makes sense to increase the production of audio content to build better relationships with the audience, enhance engagement and build communities. Audio, it’s clear, creates a friendly familiarity, a sense of knowing and being known, and an intimacy, very different from any other format.
Plenty of vertical videos
Also, any strategy in 2021 has to incorporate a fair share of vertical videos. “Vertical is more personal. When you talk to a loved one via video call on your phone, you do it holding your phone vertically, not horizontally. Vertical is more natural. The content and story feels closer,” explained award-winning journalist and founder and editor-in-chief of Frame ONE Strategies, Selymar Colon, at an #ISOJ conference.
Gamify the news experience
Another approach that shows promise is “gamification” — combining game elements with information that promotes civic participation. Based on the success we had with the stickers and virtual lenses, it would make sense to explore the creation of games that can present information in unique and entertaining ways and reach new audiences online. Research shows that there has been a significant increase in online gaming. Just the popular video game Fortnite recently had 15.3 million concurrent players, plus another 3.4 million watching live streams. This is also a popular trend for Latinos. According to Nielsen’s Gaming 360 report, in 2018, 72 percent of U.S. Hispanics 13 and older self-identify as gamers, with 40 percent saying they use two or more devices for gaming.
The next frontier is getting even more Latinos to be civically engaged with their communities at all levels. These are some of the things that have worked in the past, and some worth experimenting with as we go forward.
