Social Domination

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This year is the first election that I have been able to vote in. This is also the first year that I have not had strong opinions about one of the candidates. With feeling so undecided research had to be done. I felt that a valid way to gain information would be through social media. I choose to follow both of the candidates on twitter but stayed away from Facebook. Along with looking at the candidate’s tweets, I also paid attention to others that I follow tweeting about politics.

I thought social media was for conversation but the candidates do not seem to be using their twitter plat forms to inspire two-way communication. The candidates rarely retweet their followers messages (Pew, Aug. 2012). I think that a way to get people involved is to get people interacting with a message rather than disseminating the information.

This year the candidates are on every form of social media that they can be. In the 2008 election was the first year that social media was used in campaigns because years before that it really did not exist. In 2008 the election on social media was users posting pictures of the election booth and telling their friends who they were voting for and that they should vote too. Now users are having conversations and the candidates are using the social networking cites more than ever.

According to the Pew Research Center one of the candidates uses social media more heavely.

“The Romney campaign averaged 1 tweet per day while the Obama campaign averaged 29 tweets, 17 per day on @BarackObama (the Twitter account associated with his presidency) and 12 on @Obama2012 (the account associated with his campaign). Obama also had about twice as many blog posts on his campaign website than did Romney and more than twice as many YouTube videos.”

This is so interesting to me because social networking is something almost ever college student uses and it is extremely important that candidates take advantage of this. I think it would be interesting if research were done on the impact of the messages that the candidates are sending out. If the same holds true with negative advertisements and negative tweets? I hope this election inspires more content to be researched for future campaigns.

o http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2326/obama-outpaces-romney-on-social-media-election-2012-facebook-twitter-youtube

o http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-11-05/the-vote-a-victory-for-social-media-toobusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice

o https://twitter.com/BarackObama

o https://twitter.com/MittRomney