Will brands sit this one out?

[fomayof928@mowline]

The 2024 US presidential election is several months away, but social media is already politically charged. According to Sprout Social Listening data, from January 1 to March 6, 2024 there were almost 7.6 million conversations about the presidential election which garnered almost 45 million engagements and more than 103 billion impressions.

A screenshot of a Sprout Social Listening Topic Summary. austria b2b leads In the dashboard, you can see the total volume and engagements, potential impressions, unique authors and sentiment of a Listening query about the US presidential election.
Of these conversations, less than half were positive. A proof point that illustrates what many social marketers already know: Presidential elections make social media a hard place to navigate, even if your brand isn’t inherently political. In a typical year, running social media for a brand account is complex. But during a year like this, the complexity and risk multiply tenfold.

To make it through this year unscathed, brands should consider what audiences actually expect from them, and have a plan in place to protect their brand safety.

The dawn of social media activism—from #OccupyWallStreet to #ArabSpring to the 2016 US presidential election—changed people’s expectations of brands. Consumers started demanding that apolitical businesses take on a new level of corporate responsibility. According to Harvard Business Review, “Business has become enmeshed with politics and social issues…By 2018, CEO activism was seen as the ‘new normal.’”

In 2020, we saw brands speaking out more in response to the onset of the COVID pandemic, worldwide Black Lives Matter protests and growing concerns about climate change. So much so that brand activism on social became the expectation, and brands who remained silent on certain issues were heavily criticized.

But in the last few years, consumer demands have begun to shift again.