Why Presidential Hopefuls Want Endorsements From Social Celebrities

White House aspirants are striving to harness the power of social media-savvy stars from Lena Dunham to Phil Robertson.

- Lauren Johnson

In the 2012 presidential campaigns, social media was all about YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and about the candidates having their digital playbooks together—that is, being organized enough to regularly push out videos, posts and tweets.

This time around, in a world that is increasingly Kardashian-ized—where Instagram, Snapchat and Vine are the conduit between socially savvy stars and the public and potentially influence voters, especially millennial ones, by the masses—it is perhaps Hollywood that has emerged as the most fertile ground for partnerships for the candidates.

Celebrity endorsements are not new, of course—having been raised to an art form during President Bill Clinton's first run for the White House. But the stars and their social media prowess have never been as central to the strategies of White House aspirants.

Andrew Forrest, director of audience development for Hillary Clinton's campaign, notes that while its social media strategy involves building audiences via its own Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts, it is also "thinking about how we can put our content in front of other outlets or well-established social influencers." In one of the highest-profile examples of a campaign forging a formalized relationship with a pop-culture personality this campaign season, Clinton's team handed Lena Dunham, creator and star of HBO's Girls, the keys to the Democrat's Instagram account, which has 679,000 followers. In December, the Clinton feed posted three photos of the actress talking to voters in New Hampshire, drawing 43,500 likes and more than 1,800 comments. For her part, Dunham shared six pictures from her Hillary stumping with her 2.3 million Instagram followers, racking up an additional 124,500 likes and some 5,000 comments.