Facebook fans decide Election Day victories

Ronny Kerr · November 3, 2010 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/1353

Facebook says the majority of candidates who won House and Senate seats also had more Facebook fans

U.S. Politics on FacebookAs it turns out, social media is actually a pretty good indicator of who will win in an election, according to fresh data from U.S Politics on Facebook.

Analyzing results from “98 of the most hotly contested House races,” Facebook found that 74 percent of candidates with more fans than the competition ended up winning the actual election. In 82% of the Senate races that have been decided, candidates with more fans on Facebook won.  

In the House, 69 candidates with the most Facebook fans won, versus 24 candidates who had more fans but lost. In the Senate, 28 candidates with more fans won, while six candidates lost in spite of their popularity.

We ran a piece yesterday predicting who would win the two biggest elections in California--for governor and senator--based on how many Twitter followers each candidate had. Democrat Jerry Brown (with 1.1 million followers) readily defeated former eBay CEO and Republican candidate Meg Whitman (with around 250,000 followers) for the position of governor.

On the other hand, Democrat and incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer (with only around 25,000 followers) still managed to beat former HP CEO and Republican Carly Fiorina (with 300,000 followers).

It would be interesting to see how candidates across the country fare in terms of followers because both Twitter and Facebook only managed to predict one of the two California elections--for governor or senator--correctly. Weirdly enough, they each predicted the opposite one.

On Facebook, Whitman had over 200,000 fans, double Brown’s 100,000. Fiorina had just over 20,000 fans, half of Boxer’s 40,000. Brown won the governorship with more Twitter followers but less Facebook fans, while Boxer retained her Senate position with less Twitter followers but more Facebook fans.

There are obviously many factors we’re missing here to make a complete analysis (what were the statistics in other states? how actively did the candidates use their accounts? etc.), but this is just the beginning. Social media sites have only been actively used for a couple elections now and it’s already abundantly clear that they will continue to

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

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