Hillary Clinton Election Ad Goes Viral As American Presidential Race Heats Up Online

The next US presidential election might be a year and a half away, but that hasn’t stopped candidates from using the internet to speak directly to Americans.

Hillary Clinton announced her second bid to become the most powerful person on the planet with a two-minute video released on Sunday afternoon, which is rapidly capturing attention online.

After several years of dodging the question, Clinton released “Getting Started”, promising to become a “champion” for Americans. However, Ms. Clinton does not appear in the video until approximately 90 seconds in, focusing instead on everyday Americans throughout the video.

The video has already attracted 2.3 million views and over 215,000 shares in its first day, making it the most shared ad over the last 24 hours, putting it ahead of Dove’s – “Choose Beauty” campaign, which currently has 165,000 shares.

And considering that on average 42.4% of video shares occur in the first 3 days after launch, we can expect to see this video to gain even greater traction over the next few days. Clinton is not the only candidate to use the internet to announce her bid to become president.

Republican candidate Ted Cruz announced his candidacy via Twitter on March 22. These candidates aren’t the first in the space to use the medium to connect with voters and the American public.

President Obama famously used the web to connect with the country’s younger demographic. In March 2014, the president appeared on Funny or Die’s “Between Two Ferns” for an interview with Zach Galifianakis. He also featured on BuzzFeed, showing the president using a selfie stick, making funny faces and writing Michelle love letters, both to help boost enrollment in the Affordable Care Act.

The former Secretary of State also embraced other mediums online, including the digital meme “Texts from Hillary” back in 2012, having the image serve as her Twitter avatar until recently. Two friends started the meme as a joke, which exploded into a week of 83,000 shares on Facebook, 8,400 Twitter followers, over 45K Tumblr followers and loads of press around the country.

While older generations may still find an announcement for a top office like POTUS via social media to be unpresidential, it’s where voters are getting their content. There are 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared daily on Facebook; marketers post 25 million pieces of brand content daily and over 1 million video URLs are tweeted daily.

Undoubtedly, we can expect to see more candidates make similar announcements in the coming months all leading up to November 2016. At Unruly we’ll be keeping a close eye on how candidates are faring online, and who seems to be resonating with viewers.

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