Politicizing the Twitterverse | The Mark

Politicizing the Twitterverse | The Mark

These findings, especially the correlation with voting in particular districts, is not surprising in the least. And this report contradicts effectively the comments of the established media. See my earlier post: Media insiders, experts criticize emphasis on political distractions in media’s election coverage

"When we overlaid social-media usage (the volume of tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook fan pages, and blog postings with news-media comments) over an election map, we found some interesting trends. It appeared that more left-wing Canadians were inclined to use social media than right-wing Canadians, and that the electoral districts with the highest use of social-media tools had a higher percentage of Liberal and NDP voters than ridings with low social-media usage. Are Conservatives afraid of social media? We’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

But then, isn’t social media all about the youth vote? Actually, no. Youth certainly made very good use of social media during the recent election, but, as we looked at all the data, we found that the average age of Canadian citizens participating in social media is actually 38. The average age of Twitter users in Canada is 39, and that of Facebook users is 43. Political parties in Canada tend to view social media as the domain of those under 30, and that is an unreliable demographic for guaranteeing votes. The reasoning for this is that once you are over 30, you are far more predictable in your habits. At that point in your life, you are more likely to own a home, have at least one child, and have aging parents. That means you likely have mortgage payments and a car, which, in turn, translate into a predictable set of concerns pertaining to your lifestyle. Therefore, parties tend to focus on the concerns relative to the +30 demographic, because they are relatively stable and easy to pinpoint."