Conservatives Prepare for U.K. Election Social Media War

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has re-hired the digital experts who ran her Conservative Party’s successful 2015 election campaign as she prepares for a social media war with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, according to Bloomberg.

Craig Elder and Tom Edmonds, who were in charge of digital strategy and branding during the 2015 Tory campaign, are back in the party’s election team under the direction of political strategist Lynton Crosby, a person familiar with the matter said. The duo spent 1.2 million pounds on Facebook advertising alone in the year before the 2015 general election, vastly outstripping the reported 16,000 pounds of Labour’s outlay on the social networking site in the same period, according to official spending returns.

The investment paid off for the then Tory leader David Cameron. Highly-targeted Tory advertisements, sent to small groups of as few as 1,000 undecided voters in marginal seats, helped to sway the results and deliver Cameron an unexpected parliamentary majority. There are signs that Labour is better prepared for the digital campaign than it was two years ago. At the time of the 2015 election, Cameron’s Facebook page had 500,000 “likes“ from other users, compared with the then Labour Leader Ed Miliband’s 80,000.

Now, however, the positions are reversed. May’s own Facebook page has 350,000 likes by Friday, fewer than half of Corbyn’s tally of 843,000. The Tory party’s main Facebook account has 567,000 likes, only slightly more than Labour’s 549,000. Corbyn himself won the Labour leadership after a mass social media campaign that galvanized party members. After their 2015 victory, Elder and Edmonds launched their own company and went on to work on the unsuccessful referendum campaign to keep Britain in the European Union. They declined by phone to comment on their new role.