August 8th, 2010

Social Media War: Is It Powerful Enough to Sway Votes?

According to The Nielsen Company, Australians spend more time than any other nation on social media sites.

It will be interesting to see how the rise of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube will have an effect on the election. Will online social attitudes impact how people vote?

Analysers of blog, social networking, and news sites say that Australians are talking about the Labor party three and a half times as often as the Liberal party. This may not mean anything significant, only that people have more to say on the Labour side.

The general consensus is that the social media network is somewhat poor on both sides. They’ve both set up social channels but use them to broadcast messages just as they would in traditional media channels. This brings in a lot of spam, which is seen quite frequently on both the Liberal and Labors’ sites. They’ve also used YouTube as a way to exploit the opposition party, as seen in the video clips posted.

So is all this social media hype just talk, or a reflection of the election outcome?

Social Media