If you have been living under a rock for the past 24 hours, Barack Obama won the U.S. Presidential election. Also declaring a big win yesterday: Facebook. A couple of hours ago, Randi Zuckerberg posted statistics of yesterday’s Facebook activity. According to ZDNet, site usage was up 20 percent over the previous week, indicating that users were turning to their friends for insight on the election.
Other statistics that Facebook posted includes:
- More than 5.4 million clicked the “I voted” button that we wrote about yesterday
- The 5.4 million was out of 15 million users that logged in and were old enough to vote
- More than 1.5 million users “mentioned Obama, McCain, Palin, Biden or Election” on their wall
- More than 2.4 million joined the Facebook Election Day event
- Over 2 million election related gifts were given
If there was any doubt that Facebook had a significant influence in the election, this should make it pretty clear that Facebook is a highly active political platform. While it’s impossible to know the number of previously unregistered voters that were driven to vote by Facebook, the company posted statistics that over 50,000 people registered to vote using the site.
Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or anything else, Facebook provides individuals and organizations with a great way to influence users. One of the interesting takeaways from Facebook’s post-election statistics is that users turn to the site during important moments because they want instant feedback from their network of friends. Facebook has provided users with the ability to do exactly that.
