Social Media Metrics and Politics

By Hayley Solonynka

Introduction

• Social media fastest growing form of media• Changes the way we interact – Political campaigns and officers– Accountable and accessible– Can customize image based on analytics

• What does this mean?– Political messages and campaigns– Political engagement through social media– Audience opinions on political current events

Social Media and Political Campaigns

• Recent Presidential elections increased• Free video posting for campaign ads• Algorithms used to predict election outcome– Analyze key words – Probability-based prediction on how voters would vote

• Immediate feedback• Algorithms aren’t perfect– New and little data to pull from– Important to question it, before accepting it

Social Media and Obama Campaign

• Barack Obama– Twitter followers 2008:

118,000– Twitter followers 2012: 20+ million

2016 Election

• Could be a major component of an effective political campaign – Message out to millions, mobilize activists, target

swing voters

Hillary Clinton

• Announced via YouTube and Twitter• Generated much more Facebook conversation

than either Paul or Cruz • Doesn't capture whether those interactions

were positive or negative

Candidate Twitter FacebookHillary Clinton 3.41 million 752,000

Rand Paul 604,000 1.9 millionTed Cruz 400,000 1.2 million

Social Media and Political Engagement

• More than promotion, Engagement• How do you know if your strategies are working?

Monitor and track engagement • Twitter will track: important followers, analytics

for tweets, overall reach, top tweets• Facebook monitors too– several likes and shares appear at the top of your

newsfeed• Relevant vs. popular

Social Media and Political Current Events

• Shape how we react to and perceive certain political events

• Bias when searching specifically, closed off• Providing vs. Participating– Quick and easy way to make voice heard– Hashtags connect users with similar opinions

Social Media and Political Current Events

• Created an atmosphere where nothing can be hidden, everything is displayed and public

• Anthony Weiner (Congressman)– caught sending explicit photos to women through Twitter

• Chris Christie– closure of three lanes on George Washington Bridge in New

Jersey– Talking about the 91-year-old woman who died during the

closure– Displaying assistant’s email sent out incriminating their

involvement

Research Questions

• Will social media still be useful in the 2016 elections? How big of a role will it play in the candidate’s campaigns? How can we use the data we have now to predict future campaign changes?

• How are early candidates exerting social media influence on Twitter?

• Is current political engagement reflective of a polarized crowd, as defined by Pew Internet research?

• To what extent is the Election 2016 hashtag already being used on Twitter in April of 2015?

NodeXL

Limitations

• Still knew, little research to gather information from

• Articles tend to be biased toward a specific party, which can limit the research results

• Hard to track specifically how politicians are making the most of their campaign usage

Conclusion

• Predicting much more social media use during the 2016 elections, could be more information learned from that data

• More tools than last election• Full potential – Engaging with users– Creating online discussions to form government

policies and express public opinion