On the 6th of November the American people will decide who will win the 57th presidential election. The U.S. election will be largely fought on the web and social media represents a heavier part of the U.S. presidential election than ever before.
During the past couple of years political actors have become far more sophisticated in their use of social media and this applies to the whole range from communications to and with the voters to attempts of collecting money for campaigns. 90 percent of all senators and members of congress are on Twitter and/or Facebook and both Republicans and Democrats use “data mining”, which through careful monitoring and analysis of consumer behavior ensures that the campaigns “micro-customize” messages to voters, according to what they are searching for on Google, and what they have in their “digital basket”. As an example campaign strategists try to customize the emails they send out with their message to potential voters. A housewife with children will therefore get a different message than the working mother.
Although both parties are in the race, it seems like democrats remain in the front position in the digital arena. According to a new survey by “Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism”, the Obama campaign uses social media four times more often than the Romney campaign does. The Romney campaign tweeted once a day in June, while the Obama campaign tweeted 29 times. The Democratic candidate also had twice as many blog entries on its website and more than twice as many YouTube videos compared to Romney.
When it comes to the battlefield, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are well represented. According to a report from eMarketer Twitter’s growth is twice as big as Facebook but there is still some way to go. Twitter has only about 24 million active U.S. users, while Facebook has almost 133 million. In addition YouTube is widely used for posting videos, speeches and campaigns.
With social media as a relatively new arena, it is interesting to follow this election. In the end there could be a link between how well the two candidates perform in social media and the final outcome in early November.