This document discusses the growing role of social media in politics and political campaigns. It notes that social media allows politicians to customize their messaging based on analytics and be more accessible to voters. Recent presidential elections saw increased use of social media by candidates to promote their campaigns. The document examines Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's use of Twitter and Facebook in presidential races and how candidates can track engagement on social platforms. It also explores how social media shapes reactions to political events and allows users to easily voice opinions through hashtags. The conclusion predicts even more extensive use of social media data in the 2016 elections.

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Social Media Metrics and
Politics
By Hayley Solonynka

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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

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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

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Social Media and Obama Campaign
 Barack Obama
 Twitter followers 2008: 118,000
 Twitter followers 2012:
20+ million

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2016 Election
 Could be a major component of an effective political campaign
 Message out to millions, mobilize activists, target swing voters

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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 Facebook
Hillary Clinton 3.41 million 752,000
Rand Paul 604,000 1.9 million
Ted Cruz 400,000 1.2 million

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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NodeXL

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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

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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
 hsolonynka.wordpress.com
 twitter.com/HN_Solo