No one can deny the importance of social media in today’s modern world, as the number of internet users is growing more rapidly than ever before all around the world. Due to this very reason, recently re-elected U.S. President Barack Obama and his political campaign managers understood that harnessing this strong medium and using it to reach out to people of America would be an integral part of their victory.
America’s president possesses a tremendous amount of clout on social media, embracing it successfully as a means of communicating with those who elect him. This can be judged from the fact that after winning the election last week, President Obama tweeted a mere three words “Four more years” along with a picture that instantly became a hit. The tweet and photo were retweeted by 500,000 users on the famous micro-blogging website, Twitter with 115,000 users declaring it as a favourite.
The impactful tweet from the POTUS (President of the United States) became the most retweeted message in the history of Twitter. The tweet exceeded the previous record holder from earlier this year, a tweet from young pop icon Justin Bieber, who wrote “RIP Avalanna. i love you”. That tweet by Bieber was retweeted 223,376 times, less than half of Obama’s tweet.
Just like Twitter, things were not much different on Facebook, as Obama’s victory note received 1.2 million ‘Likes’ and about 170,000 users shared it within in an hour of the status updated. If these facts were not enough to comprehend the importance of social media, then check this out:
Although Americans had to wait for the result of the polls to see the ultimate winner, social media had declared Obama as the winner of the popular vote. This was made evident on Facebook, where he got 32 million fans as compared to Romney’s 12 million and 22 million followers on Twitter in contrast to Romney’s 1.7 million devotees.
Source: Venture Beat