INFOGRAPHIC: Mapping the Politics of the Social Web
Like to sell stuff on eBay? You might be a Romney voter — and you’re probably very highly engaged politically. Like xckd and Tumblr? You’re totally in the Obama camp — but a bit less likely to exhibit political interests, at least if your Facebook likes are any indication.
Over the past few months, we’ve crunched countless “Likes” from thousands of users of Trendsetter, our first-of-its-kind platform that ties together polling, social influence data, and consumer preferences. We’ve used it to map the politics of the social web, analyzing the political partisanship of the user bases of various social properties. Using predictive modeling of Facebook likes, we tied political preferences and engagement to one’s choice of social media, and this bubble graph is the result:
Many of the results intuitively make sense. Sites that tend to skew more Republican include those oriented towards commerce and personal finance — like PayPal, eBay, Zillow and LinkedIn (not to mention Amazon, albeit at lower levels of political engagement). Sites that index higher for political engagement include Quora, BuzzFeed, and Wikipedia, which emphasize information and knowledge. Meanwhile, visual pinboards and social games may be fertile ground for the campaigns to find new voters, as those sites often demonstrate defined political leanings combined with lower levels of political engagement. If you were to push sites in various categories into one camp or the other, you’d come up with this:
| OBAMA | ROMNEY | |
| Visual Media | Tumblr | |
| Social Gaming | Angry Birds (swing) | FarmVille |
| Commerce | Etsy, Zappos | Amazon, eBay |
| Music | Spotify | Pandora (swing) |
In the past few weeks, Trendsetter users have weighed in on topics as diverse as the Presidential race, gay marriage, health care, and whether Kurt Busch should be banned from NASCAR. We tie polling results to Facebook likes and levels of user engagement and give you a customized report of your Facebook influence and that of your friends’.
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Alex Sullivan wrote on July 11th, 2012 at 3:35 pm:
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