Controversy, Politics and Social Media

Controversy, Politics and Social Media

How to express political viewpoints on your Facebook wall without alienating friends.

There is a popular business book called How to Win friends and Influence people. Expressing your political and religious viewpoints on your social media can be more like How to lose friends and offend people. People are ultimately tied to their political and religious beliefs as they are intertwined with their identity.

They exist in an echo chamber of other people with similar politics and religious beliefs, often times their entire life, there by strengthening their beliefs that they are correct and framing their politics and religion.

In any particular viewpoint, on the Internet there will always be an opposing view point shared by a percentage of your friends the more friends you have on Facebook/social media.

When you express a view point that contradicts their beliefs, it not only challenges their beliefs, but their identity as well. This results in continuous back-and-forth comments that escalate quickly and can result in name-calling, defriending, and broken relationships.

If you are a political pundit, and your career is helped by political controversy then this might make sense. If however, you gain nothing in relationships or Business in alienating or offending people, there are alternative ways to express your viewpoints and potentially convert a percent of the masses over to your narrative on social media.

One alternative solution is to create a fan page/business entity surrounding your viewpoint.

For example, instead of posting choice A over choice B on your Facebook wall, you can instead create a Facebook fan page called People for choice A or Choice A fan club. You can then use that fan page to express your viewpoints freely without any direct ties to you personally. Furthermore it gives you the option to boost/advertise your posts through paid advertising and you can even share the post onto your wall with a question like, "what do you guys think about this?"

You can then further your marketing for your viewpoint with a blog, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. If you create a large enough base, you can even add advertising and sponsorship to raise money for yourself or for your cause or any other charity that supports your viewpoint.

Controversial topics and articles that evoke emotion, especially anger, get shared the most which is why viral bloggers love it to increase traffic and clicks to their advertisers. Take your controversial passions and turn it into a movement using Internet marketing.

 

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