LSU study: Obama’s social media dominance doesn’t necessarily signify voter support

In our increasingly digital world, pundits and talking heads have discussed at length the social media presence of President Barack Obama and his GOP challenger Mitt Romney in their respective campaigns for the White House. While the Obama campaign has been widely declared the “winner” when it comes to social media use and popularity, a new study released by the LSU Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs shows all those tweets and Facebook posts won’t necessarily translate into more votes for Obama—even among those younger voters who are key to winning the election and are being heavily courted online by both candidates. “There is no statistically significant difference between Obama and Romney support among likely voters between 18 and 34 who use social networking as a source of political news,” reads the study’s executive summary. “Even when heavy users of social media and those who ‘like,’ ‘follow’ or ‘view’ are assessed, there is no meaningful difference in support across the two candidates.” The Public Policy Research Lab at LSU talked to 1,009 randomly selected registered voters nationwide for the study, which you can see in its entirety here.