BY LAJU ARENYEKA (with Agency Reports)

Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 coincided with a time that Social media was just beginning to gain popularity all over the world. Conservative, and in a higher age bracket, John McCain did not stand a chance with many twitter and facebook followers.

Although experts are not sure of the extent of the impact of the social media on the U.S elections, they do not deny that opinions on the virtual scale, just might have had an impact on the actual votes. During the campaign, Barack Obama held a distinct advantage over Mitt Romney in the way his campaign used digital technology to communicate directly with voters. The Obama campaign posted almost four times more content and was active on nearly twice as many platforms, according to a Pew Research study analyzing the content and volume of candidate communications on their websites and social media channels.

According to a recent study by the Pew research institute, from the beginning of the political conventions to the eve of the final debate, social media and blog postings about US presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have been relentlessly negative.

”We found social media very harsh,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “We also found it fairly insensitive to events. It moved some but was pretty relentlessly negative about both candidates, particularly Romney.”

There is no doubt mainstream media coverage influences what is being said on social media, especially on Facebook, where users tend to be more politically engaged and often more partisan.  Earlier this year, Pew’s Internet and American Life project found that 18% of facebook users have unfriended or blocked someone online due to political issues. Twitter   developed tools that showed the social media activity around Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s campaigns.

This Political Engagement Map measured the number of replies, retweets and favourites each of the candidates got on the social networks and allowed viewers to filter this information by state and by topic. Meanwhile Facebook   teamed up with CNN to build this real-time visualisation of Facebook users’ activity about the election.