The Role Of Social Media In The 2012 Presidential Campaign

Social media has remained a powerful source of campaigning activity during the 2012 Presidential elections. However, advertising has become much more precise in 2012 than compared to its clumsy, proto form in 2008. Much more research has been done to have media distribute the correct or appropriate form of messages or advertisement to specific audiences; it was all thanks to new technology, namely Facebook's "sponsored-results tool", that can gather voter information through cookies and data that websites can collect for researchers and marketers to analyze. For example, people who liked or browsed Obama's Facebook posts were more likely to see Obama's presidential campaign advertisements appear wherever they browse on the world wide web. However, Romney's campaigning organization employed the sponsored-results tool more than the Obama campaign and easily redirected users to the Romney and Paul campaign website even though users searched for other candidates such as Obama, …show more content…
The potency of YouTube as a source of political advertisement is too obvious to miss. In order to maximize the amount of viewers and traffic that landed on their website, YouTube's politics channel was created to attract users who were politically savvy; in addition, the official channel was linked to independent or amateur channels that were also political in nature. YouTube's role as the media was to make official campaign videos even more accessible to the public than television ever did. For instance, Obama's channel on YouTube achieved over 262 million views during the six years of its existence. Some of Obama's most popular videos pertained to his policies and promises, such as Obamacare. Because of the way video advertising makes policies more accessible to the public, the media began to educate people more on policy than merely a candidate's