Digital Politics | Email on Mobiles | Newspaper Circs | Social & Search

May 4, 2012

comscore-pres-candidates-online-audience-composition-may2012.jpgPresident Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney show varying audience patterns when comparing the composition of their website and social media visitors, finds comScore [download page] in an April 2012 report. President Obama’s website visitors skew older in general than his social media site visitors, with 57% of the former group aged 45 and over, compared to 22% of the latter. This might be expected, given social networking sites’ higher penetration among younger age groups. Surprisingly, though, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s website audience skews younger than his social media audience, with 46% of the former aged under 35, compared to 41% of the latter.

According to March 2012 figures from Nielsen, 52% of visitors to BarackObama.com during January were either aged 50-65 (34.6%) or over 65 (17.4%), the highest proportion of the 5 candidates studied.

  • In other findings from the comScore report, President Obama dominates the other candidates in display ad share of voice, at 86%. By volume of exposure, President Obama is far outpacing the Republican field in leveraging social media, also. However, looking at the ratio of paid to earned impressions in January 2012, Ron Paul was easily the winner, with more than twice as many exposures than he paid for.
  • According to a May 2012 report from ReturnPath, by the end of this year, more people will be reading emails on a mobile device than on a desktop or on webmail. The report indicates that if all US mobile internet time was condensed into one hour, 25 minutes would be spent on email. Further results show that desktop email clients are the most popular during the weekday, while webmail and mobile are more popular during the weekend.
  • Data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ semiannual newspaper FAS-FAX and Audience-FAX reports released in May 2012 show that circulation for the 618 newspapers reporting comparable multiday averages has risen 0.68% year-over-year, while circulation for the 532 newspapers reporting comparable Sunday data has increased 5%. Digital circulation now accounts for 14.2% of newspapers’ circulation mix, representing 64% growth from 8.66% share a year ago.
  • A May 2012 report from TastyPlacement claims that certain promotional social media activities bear a causal link to increased search engine rankings. Promoting a series of target websites through different social activities, the company found that securing 100 followers to a linked Google+ business page yielded the biggest rise in Google position (14.63), followed by securing 300 Google +1 votes (a rise of 9.44), securing 70 Facebook shares and increasing likes by 50 to a linked Facebook page (6.9), and securing 50 tweets and retweets pointing to a homepage (2.88). The selected website that was used as a control had no meaningful change (-0.11). More details on the study and its methodology can be found here.
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