2010 Election and the Role of Social Media, Part One
Posted November 2nd, 2010 by Jason Douglas
Jason Douglas
Spyder Trap Online Marketing
Upon logging into Facebook today, it was interesting to note that Facebook gave users the option to state that they had participated in the 2010 election and had voted. Once you clicked that you had voted, a post with a badge appears on your wall and in your friends’ news feed.
This is noteworthy for two reasons:
First: this is another move by Facebook to mirror Foursquare. If badges and a version of a mayorship become part of Facebook Places, with the audience that Facebook can reach, this may help Facebook creep into Foursquare’s following.
Second: this is the first time, to my knowledge, where we will see how active social media users are in the political process. This will go further than tracking conversation.
One thing can be measured here: percentage of Facebook users who are eligible to vote that actually vote.
Currently, there are 130,048,480 Facebook users in the United States who are age 18 and older. This is the number I will use when figuring out the percentage of Facebook voters.
As of 2:49pm, 5,457,197 Facebook users have said they have voted, equaling a 4.196% voter turnout. In the 2008 Presidential election, 61.7% of eligible voters participated.
In 2008, Barack Obama used a strong online marketing strategy, led by his presence on Twitter and Facebook, and an aggressive email campaign, to become the 44th President. It was believed that the use of online marketing tactics, including social media, might help candidates gain exposure and recruit voters for their causes.
In part two of this blog series, I will share the final statistics of Facebook voter turnout, and compare that to the voter turnout of the United States. This will be a first look to see if social media users are truly more engaged than the rest of the eligible voters.
Tags: 2010 election, Facebook, Minneapolis Online Marketing, online, Social Media
2 Responses to “2010 Election and the Role of Social Media, Part One”
November 2nd, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Interesting article, but I just want to point out that Facebook employed this same feature in the 2008 presidential elections in which 5.4 million Facebook users clicked the “I Voted” button to share with their friends that they voted and that was before Foursquare was even around.
November 2nd, 2010 at 3:41 pm
Hey Jared,
Thanks for reading and commenting. I’m glad you noticed that. I do not remember such a thing in 2008. Any way you can email me the article where you found that stat? Looks like that will be a good benchmark to use for comparison.
Thanks!
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