Here's a great example of the power of Twitter. Last week, I tweeted the following:
I would love to see a study from @pew_internet showing what percentage of Twitter/Facebook users are registered to vote.
This morning, I received a response via email from Pew Internet Research Specialist, Aaron Smith, answering my question in detail:
In our post-election survey conducted in November 2008, 85% of Americans claimed to be registered to vote. For internet users as a whole the figure is 88%; for users of social networking sites the figure is 86%; and for those who use Twitter or other status update services, the figure is 83%. Ultimately, all of these are within the margin of error—we found no statistically significant differences on this question based on social media use.
There are a few caveats to this. For one thing, telephone surveys tend to overstate voter registration and turnout somewhat (since people don’t want to admit that they aren’t registered, or did not vote in an election). Second, the Twitter and social networking universe in November 2008 was quite a bit smaller than it is now. However, while the magnitude of the numbers above might be overstated I don’t have any reason to believe that the differences between groups are any more or less pronounced than we found in 2008. If anything I’d guess that users of social media applications have gotten more like the overall population in their voting behavior as increasing numbers of middle-aged people adopt these services (since older adults are generally more likely to be registered voters than the young people who were early adopters of Twitter and social networking sites).
