If you are candidate for office or an office holder in the 21st Century, you need to be present on the internet. You need to be present on social media. And you need to be active on these sites. If you are not, it is as if you do not exist. You could have 100 district offices and it would not make up for your lack of presence in the social media world.
What kind of presence should you have as a candidate or office holder? The order or priority is as follows:
1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Website
4. Instagram
Screw Snapchat or LinkedIn or Google+. Those are not necessary or not as trafficked or not intended for political use anyway. A good and most likely successful candidate and/or office holder has all four. Indeed, if you don’t have Instagram but have the others, you are still good since Instagram can really be redundant if you are updating Twitter and Facebook with pictures.
But if all you have is an out of date website designed in the last decade, or in the 1990’s, you have failed. If you don’t have an updated Facebook account for your office, you have failed. And when I am talking about a Facebook account, I am not talking about your own personal one that has pictures of puppies and sunsets. No, you have to set up a separate page for yourself as a candidate or elected official, that allows everyone to “like” or “follow” you without you getting approval of it.
So that all said, here is your list of candidates and their social media links. You will see the statewides, save Karen Weldin Stewart and the lesser known candidates, doing pretty well. When we get to the General Assembly, that’s another story.
Update: Mark Blake now has a website.
