Infographic: Social Media Election

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Explosive rise in social media may be a predictor of election results

Anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account has probably noticed an increase in the number of political postings over the past few years. This is due, in part, to the explosive rise in social media outlets and users. But voters are not the only people who use social media; among politicians, 9 out of 10 Senators and Representatives have Twitter accounts, and use them prolifically during election season.

However, many are starting to wonder if social media is becoming less a reporter of political races and more of a predictor of the results. In Senate races, the candidate with more Facebook friends than his or her opponent has won 81 percent of the time. And one email sent to 60 million Facebook users prompted an additional 340,000 people to vote in the 2010 election. This infographic illustrates just how politics and social media are affecting each other.

Social Media Election

 

Creative Commons License
Social Media Election by OpenSite is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

 

From Wikipedia: Social media can be defined as “interactive platforms via which individuals and communities create and share user-generated content.”Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.” I.e. Social media are social software which mediate human communication. When the technologies are in place, social media is ubiquitously accessible, and enabled by scalable communication techniques. In the year 2012, social media became one of the most powerful sources for news updates through platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

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