In the past few years social media has solidified its position as a legitimate way to market a brand, product, or service. In this election year politicians and other public figures have not missed this revelation. Many politicians can now be found on social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as submitting campaign videos to sites like YouTube or Vimeo. With the election only a few weeks away, we were interested to know -- does the popularity of a presidential candidate drive social media awareness or do social media efforts drive popularity? Our team hit the Web’s most popular social media sites to find out the answer.
Throughout his candidacy Barack Obama’s online campaign has been very well organized and maintains a strong social media presence. Our research concludes that Obama’s social media presence is nearly three times stronger than John McCain’s presence on many of the websites analyzed like MySpace, Facebook, Eons, and Delicious.com.
MySpace and Facebook
Looking at the popular social media site MySpace, we took into account how many “Friends” each candidate currently has to determine overall popularity. As of October 20, 2008, Obama had 745,480 friends while McCain had 189,090. At face value, these numbers from MySpace demonstrate that Obama is a much more popular candidate than McCain – at least with the MySpace demographic.
The data taken from Facebook relates to each candidate’s “Supporters” data as listed on their respective Facebook pages. As of October 21st 2008, Obama’s supporters are currently listed at 2,216,174 and can be found here. McCain on the other hand has only 589,047 and can be found on his Facebook page. This too supports Obama’s strength in social media as well as the Facebook demographic.
McCain Advantage in Eons?
Eons is a social networking site marketed to “Baby Boomers”, or the generation of relatively older Americans born soon after the end of World War II. It is very similar to MySpace and Facebook, but gives us a chance to look at social data pertaining specifically to age. While Obama is said to reach the younger voting demographic (e.g. MySpace, Facebook, etc.), McCain is traditionally said to have an older, more conservative demographic. As a result, one would expect to see a higher percentage of McCain supporters in the Eons community. Interestingly enough, we found this prediction was incorrect. Our team discovered that Obama has 547 total group members on Eons while McCain has only 210 total group members, making Obama the more popular choice once again.
Delicious Advantage
Delicious.com is a social book marking website that allows users to share their favorite websites. Rather than using your browser to save a Web page, Delicous allows users to save bookmarks on delicious.com. The benefit is that you can search other user’s bookmarks and the most popular web pages become the most bookmarked. It is a fairly reliable gauge of a website’s popularity. Obama wins this one as well with 2,757 total bookmarks compared to 443 bookmarks for John McCain.
Does Social Media Strength Translate to Popularity?
It is clear that Obama has a significantly higher social media presence than John
McCain, but does that mean that he has more resources or that he is more
popular? If we cross reference the data
with sources that cannot be controlled by the campaigns we could see if the
social media presence of Obama is due to his resources or if it is simply a
result of the popularity of the candidate. To make this determination we
explored two applications: Google Trends and Tradesports.
Tradesports is an online trading exchange that allows users to speculate on politcal candidates (among other things). Similar to betting for sporting events (such as horse races), when a certain team/player is expected to win, they will have better odds. According to Tradesports, the odds are in favor of Obama; traders give the Senator a 84% chance of becoming the next president, leaving McCain with only a 16% chance.
Google Trends is an application illustrating average search volume for specified queries. The search volume for John McCain and Barack Obama follows the same trend as the social media sites with a significant lead for Obama in web popularity.
Social Media Impact
Overall this data shows that Obama has a much stronger presence online and although his campaign may be well organized, his online strength is a reflection of the general public’s overall feeling for him as a presidential candidate. Although it turns out that popularity may be the driving factor behind a stronger social media presence, a strong social media team in a campaign certainly helps to create online spaces where that popularity can flourish. For example, John McCain’s Myspace page has been broken for over 10 days (since October 6th, 2008). It fails to completely load, showing only half the page. This type of error shows not only a major lack of resources in the McCain online team, but also may potentially deter undecided voters who are trying to gather research about a candidate in order to make a voting decision.
Social media has played a larger role during this election period than in any prior one, and its role will only continue to grow in the future. American people want to feel like they can relate to a candidate, and social media marketing and optimization presents the perfect opportunity to do so by providing insight into candidate’s daily thoughts and activities. Only time will tell if there is a correlation between the strength of a candidate’s social media presence and a successful presidential campaign.