Election 2008: Social Networking Roundup

November 4, 2008

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech

With less than 24 hours until the high-profile 2008 US election comes to a close, Barack Obama is leading in online social networking by nearly all measures, according to social computing expert and Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang, who posted social networking statistics for Barack Obama and John McCain on his blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah.

Social networking activity for both candidates cited by Owyang:

  • On Facebook, Obama has 2,379,102 supporters and McCain has 620,359. This means that Obama has 3.8 times as many supporters as McCain.
  • On MySpace, Obama has 833,161 friends, while McCain has only 217,811. These results also show Obama with 3.8 times as many friends as McCain.
  • On YouTube, there have been 1,792 Obama-related videos uploaded since November 2006, (roughly 4 uploads/day), with 114,559 subscribers and 18,413,110 channel views. There have been 329 McCain-related videos uploaded since Feb 2007 (about 2 uploads/day, but in a shorter time period), with 28,419 subscribers and 2,032,993 channel views. These figures point to the fact that Obama has 4 times more subscribers and 9 times more viewers as McCain.
  • On Twitter, Obama:@barackobama has 112,474 followers, while McCain:@JohnMcCain has 4,603 followers Obama has more than 240 times the followers McCain has.

Owyang speculates that Obama shows clear dominance in social media beyond any political-poll projections for either of two reasons. One, it may be because the Obama campaign moved more quickly to social networking and social media; or two, because the social technographics (behaviors to adopt social media) skew more heavily toward Obama’s voter demographics.

In other completely unscientific attempts to predict election results, the 7-Election Coffee-Cup Poll from 7-Eleven shows Obama leading by 20 percentage points (60% to 40%), and the Busken Cookie Poll from Ohio shows Obama winning 12,719 cookie orders to McCain’s 5,564. Both polls claim to have predicted the election’s winner since their inception.

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