Social media is revolutionizing the way that political campaigns track and target voters. New technologies are constantly being invented to track support for candidates. A few of the newer ones that can influence the 2014 elections are Zignal Labs and Tracx.

Zignal Labs provides a way for campaigns to track many different forms of digital communication. According to the website, it was “founded with the understanding that the traditional 24-hour news cycle now runs closer to 24-minutes.” Communications analysts need a way to quickly keep track of everything happening that concerns the campaign.

One important feature of Zignal Labs is the Dashboard. It provides a summary of the total mentions of a campaign through all forms of social media. Staff members take this information and analyze it to create a positive/negative sentiment reading for the campaign.

Finally, Zignal Labs sends email and text alerts to campaigns every time a news article mentions the candidate. This provides a great benefit for political campaigns, as staff members will not have to spend valuable time searching for these articles. This information is also used in the Dashboard analysis by staff members.

Another tool that political campaigns can use is Tracx. While this is not specifically focused towards campaigns, it provides several features that can be extremely useful. Tracx is able to measure the size of social media conversations, and can even show specific areas in which the conversation is strongest.

One feature of Tracx that is particularly useful for political campaigns is the audience demographic summary. For every person that is tracked based on social media, the campaign can be provided with many pieces of demographic information. This is important for campaigns when they want to figure out what demographic groups need to be targeted.

Although there are many tools that can be used by political campaigns, these two provide some of the greatest benefits to communications professionals. If campaigns take advantage of these tools, tracking social media will be more efficient and cost-effective.