The medium made the Man: Did Donald Trump’s use of social networks influence American voters in US election 2016?

The political campaign operated by Donald Trump and his team has been something American people have never faced before. Indeed, it has been an untraditional campaign perfectly tailored to an unconventional man. If Roosvelt delivered his discourses to the citizens through radio waves and Kennedy appeared on the little screen talking and moving like a famous actor, then Trump talked to his people directly from his social media accounts (Carr, 2015).
However, the analysis of the literature highlights that Trump exploited several communication tools during his race to the American presidency. Starting with rudimental instruments, Trump had been collecting money from small donors by selling merchandise and gadgets – such as the famous “Make America Great Again” (Doggett et al., 2016).
He, then, invested quite massively on renting arenas for his speeches: Trump’s 2016 total rallies amount to 302 (Kreutz & Smith, 2016). Interesting is the fact that in August 2016 Trump spent almost $4.4 million organizing such events, while Clinton only totalled $2.3 (Savi, 2016). According to Savi (2016), Donald Trump could have preferred to talk directly to his angry and disillusioned Americans and capitalize on his strong rhetoric to gather free media attention.
Nonetheless, Trump’s campaign profited also from television and radio advertising, even if in a miserable way. As stated in chapter 2.1, Trump did not dispose of large-scale infrastructures and big donors’ endorsement to raise money, being at an economic disadvantage compared to Clinton. This led him to refrain from massively spending on television advertising. Dumenco (2016) reported in his analysis that Trump’s campaign had booked only $654,455 in TV and radio ads for the period 14 July - 7 November, which was an invisible amount of money if compared to Clinton’s $111 million.
Furthermore, even if Trump’s ground game appeared almost non-existent, he heavily leaned on the Republican National Committee’s infrastructures and technological bones to rule a weak field operation (Darr, 2016).
He did, instead, extensively use social media to both find and compel potential supporters to donate money and to spread his message (Lapowsky, 2016b). Indeed, data indicates that Trump’s campaign invested primarily in online advertising and digital consulting than on any other communication instrument: during the month of August 2016, Trump totalled $11.1 million spent digitally, while he funnelled only $5.3 million in television and radio (Allison, Harris & Rojanasakul, 2016).
Trump’s electoral campaign broke up with the traditional American playbook. “The Mogul used unconventional campaign tactics and relied on free media to get his messages out. He won primary elections with one of the smallest campaign budgets. He skimped on ground organization and field offices. Most important, he spent less on television advertising – typically the single biggest expenditure for a campaign – than any other candidate” (Aloisi, 2016).