Final Presidential Social Media Stats...

On this presidential election day, without yet knowing the results, we thought it might be worth taking one final look at how online social media may, or may not, have affected the election outcome.

In terms of measuring people's expectations about the social media presence of presidential candidates, consider...

• 88% of social media users are registered voters.
• 51% of social media users used social media to learn more about the Presidential candidates for the 2012 election.
• 6 in 10 people expect presidential candidates to have a social media presence.
• 1 in 4 social media users with mobile phones aged 10-34 said that “it is important to receive information about candidates on their mobile phone”.
• 38% of social media users agreed that information found on social media was as impactful in making a decision as traditional media.

How much did the candidates actually make use of online social media?  By almost all measures, Barack Obama had vastly superior numbers...

	Barack Obama	Mitt Romney
Facebook likes	31.7 million	11.9 million
Twitter followers	21.8 million	1.7 million
YouTube views	253 million	27 million

As usual, however, these stats probably say more about each candidate's base of supporters than about the candidates' use of the medium itself.

Let's see how everything unfolds tonight, and then we can postulate on the relevance, or non-relevance, of all of this.