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Election Strategy: Getting Historical Perspective
Election Strategy: Getting Historical Perspective
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Written by Tess
Updated over a week ago

Looking to get insight into major stories from previous campaigns/news cycles or to be reminded of things that candidates and officials have said in the past? CrowdTangle is able to:

Pulling Historical Data from Lists, Searches, or the Database

 
Step 1:  First, decide which Platforms are most representative of the candidates/incumbents in the election you're following.  If you haven't yet, set up the appropriate Election-themed Lists or Saved Searches to track the specific candidates or elections you want historical perspective on.

Step 2: In the Dashboard of your choosing, navigate to the Historical Data section under the gear icon on the upper-right side of CrowdTangle.

Step 3: Choose where to pull Historical Data from:

  • If you want to get a record of what a candidate has said, choose a List or Search with the Pages/Accounts of them and their staff or choose a specific Account/Page of theirs

  • If you want a record of what you wrote about a candidate/election, choose a List or Search that includes you own Pages/Accounts

  • If you want a record of competitive coverage of a candidate/election, choose a List or Search that includes the Pages/Accounts of your competitors

  • If you want to simply see what the top stories were generally, choose "Search Entire System"

Step 4: Choose appropriate filters to ensure you get the right information.  Overperforming posts can help you hone in on the posts that were most successful with the audience, and Total Interactions can help you highlight stories/posts that inspired the largest number of people to interact in some way.

Step 5:  Choose a custom date range that covers either an entire election or a specific period of time in the election.  CrowdTangle will email a csv with the post information within a few minutes.

Getting Automatic Reminders of Posts from a Year Ago

 

Step 1:  First, decide which Platforms are most representative of the candidates/incumbents in the election you're following.  If you haven't yet, set up the appropriate Election-themed Lists or Saved Searches to track the specific candidates or elections you want historical perspective on.

Step 2:  Choose the List or Saved Search you would like to pull historical data from, and then click on its Notifications tab.  Once there, Choose Digest.

Step 3: Set up your Digest as you would any other, but under More Scheduling Options, click on the slider that says "Posts From One Year Ago".  

Step 4: Under Advanced Options, choose Total Interactions to see what had the biggest impact at that point in time.

  

Pulling Historical Data from a List or Search's Post Stream

 

Step 1:  First, decide which Platforms are most representative of the candidates/incumbents in the election you're following.  If you haven't yet, set up the appropriate Election-themed Lists or Saved Searches to track the specific candidates or elections you want historical perspective on.

Step 2:  Choose the List or Saved Search you would like to pull historical data from, and then click on its Posts tab.  Once there, set the timeframe to the period of time you want to get historical perspective on.

Step 3:  Choose Total Interactions to see what made the biggest impact, or choose Overperforming to study content that performed particularly well compared to other content from the same Page/Account.

Step 4:  Click on the CSV export button, and then wait for the file to be emailed to you.  Once it has been, you can open it up and filter by interaction data or overperforming score and can quickly browse through the titles of posts and find the URLs to re-visit those posts directly.

Note- This strategy works best for Link and Video posts
 

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