President Obama – How He Used Social Media To Win His Election

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We all know how historic the 2008 US Elections have been, President Barack Obama has a lot of ‘first’ in history now, one of them being the 1st presidential candidate who owes a big portion of his ‘thanks for helping me win’ to the Internet!

Social Media Networking played a massive role in Obama’s campaign, he has MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, his website and even an SMS opt in. What are the factors that made all the difference for Obama’s campaign? It wasn’t anything new, they didn’t invent anything special, rather they combined different social networking applications that had a huge impact on people all over the net and they managed to raise money, organize locally for different states, they had more power in fighting smear campaigns and eventually gain the vote of the people.

Lets compare some numbers starting with blogs. Mc Cain had about 150 million mentions in blogs, President Obama had close to 500 million! That’s a huge difference. President Obama has close to a million friends and got 10,000 more around Election Day. McCain has a little over 200,000 friends and gained 964 more on Election Day. Obama is also leading in twitter with about 12,000 followers while McCain didn’t reach 5000. Then we have YouTube with 134,000 Obama followers and more than 3 million on Facebook!

Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to help him earn his seat, John F. Kennedy used TV, and Howard Dean used the web for raising money, President Obama on the other hand took the web and used it to lower the cost of building a political brand and with it get closer to more people. This is a day and age where people’s identities are hooked online and that’s simply a fact. How many people can you count that you know who doesn’t have a PC, a laptop, a blueberry or a cellular phone? People want to be informed now and President Obama can get to them.

So all this Social Media networking was more on campaigning and viral marketing, what’s going to happen now that he’s president? For starters, it will now cost the white house close to $0 to get in touch with millions of Americans via all the different means they have used during the campaign. Now, President Obama has millions of names and email addresses of supporters all over the country and it doesn’t stop here, hello supporters do you smell the 2012 elections?

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