Yesterday, the Oxford Internet Institute released a map of the US charting the visibility on Twitter of both the country’s presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, prior to the polling results. The data predicted that Obama would be re-elected as, according to the Institute, he had been tweeted about more frequently than his Republican rival.
Well, the results are in and, as you know (unless you really have been living in a cave), Obama has indeed won a second term in the White House.
Does that mean Twitter can really be useful in predicting the outcome of events? After all, this doesn’t take into account sentiment or indeed represent any real link between mentions and actual votes. It will be interesting to see how Twitter trends continue to correlate with the real world and whether we see new technologies and services that can make tangible use from the findings. What do you think we’ll see by the time the next US election comes around?
Does this not indicate that supporters of Obama tend to be users of twitter? Texas for instance had a high volume of tweets about Obama but Romney received more votes.
Also It would be useful to monitor and distinguish between positive and negative tweets.
However it’s no surprise that many have called this the Twitter election.
Posted by: A.Turner | 07 November 2012 at 12:44