Ben Carson’s secret weapon is Facebook

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Carson’s secret sauce? Not Snapchat; not Twitter; not Instagram. Rather, Carson’s brain trust said emphatically, it’s Facebook.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Barry Bennett, Ed Brookover and Doug Watts said the Carson campaign’s social media team, which now numbers eight to 10 paid staff, and specifically how it leverages Facebook, serve as the lynchpin of the candidates’ 2016 strategy. The iconic social media hub is at the center of Carson’s fundraising, grassroots organizing and voter turnout preparations, beginning with the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses.

“We didn’t have to hire an outside outfit to do any of this stuff,” Watts, Carson’s chief communications counselor, said. “What it is, is, we all came in sharing the ethic of having a social media-oriented — centric — campaign, because we were all totally taken with [President] Obama’s campaign in 2007 and 2008, and of course no Republican has even come close to exercising that kind of a program. And we thought you could.”

Carson has 4.3 million Facebook fans, a couple of million of whom actively engage with the campaign during a typical week. He has slightly more Facebook fans than Trump, a universally known reality television star, and more than double that of Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Carson personally takes and answers three questions every night on his Facebook page; the interaction generates an average of 100,000 responses that are shared approximately 10,000 times.

The Carson campaign boasts the ability to turnout sizable rallies on a few days notice, whether the 2,500 who showed up in Durango, Colo., or the 12,000 who greeted the former Johns Hopkins surgeon in Phoenix, simply by activating its Facebook network. The campaign says it has more than 400,000 donors nationally and more than 27,000 Iowans who have engaged with it some fashion. The campaign’s internal models have identified 72,000 potential Carson voters in the Hawkeye State.

Bennett, the veteran Republican operative managing Carson’s campaign, is the operation’s chief social media tinkerer and behind much of the engagement-driven content that ends up on the candidate’s Facebook page. The campaign team has nicknamed Bennett “reset” because he’s constantly pressing the “reset” button on the computer to check Carson’s growth on Facebook. He said the key to Carson’s social media success is “good content.”

“Content is king,” Bennett said. “Social media is a tad voyeuristic; [voters] want to see things that they can’t see anywhere else.”

“The question is, what can you ask them to do, that they will do right now, that they will engage in?” he added.

Carson, 64, is running second to Trump among Republican voters nationally in the RealClearPolitics.com polling average, and ranks second, also to Trump, in the Examiner’s presidential power rankings. In Iowa, Carson is nipping at Trump’s heels, trailing the front-runner in the RealClearPolitics average by less than one percentage point, 21 percent to 20.3 percent. In the Quinnipiac survey unveiled Thursday, Carson led Trump 28 percent to 20 percent.

Facebook is the anchor of Carson’s social media presence, but not the only digital medium the 2016 contender is utilizing.

Carson’s team has started promoting him via “Rivet,” a marketing tool in the form of a user-generated content management system, to stoke voter engagement with the campaign. Carson also is involving voters via “ShoutOmatic” an engagement tool that allows the campaign to send supporters a phone number to call to hear messages from the candidate. And, Carson is the first political figure to use the “TopFan” smart phone application originally built for music artists Taylor Swift and Pitbull.

There is one popular social media platform the campaign doesn’t like: Twitter. The twitterverse doesn’t figure prominently into the campaign’s strategy. “Twitter is a place where people go to yell at each other,” Bennett said.