Explaining Facebook Support in 2008 Congressional Campaigns

A new report out of Southern Illinois University, delivered at the Harvard Political Networks Conference, attempts to quantify the use and effectiveness of Facebook support pages in the 2008 House elections: Explaining Facebook Support in the Congressional Election Cycle.

The report is a useful, if incomplete look at the factors behind congressional campaign support on Facebook during the 2008 cycle. It looks primarily at the advantages/disadvantages of money, incumbancy and district demographics. Where it fails short (and the authors readily admit there is much more research to be done on this issue) is in how campaigns actually used Facebook to organize - via the "Events" function, cleaning up young voter lists, etc. The effectiveness of those types of activities strikes me as much more useful data for campaigns staffers looking ahead to 2010.

That said, here's a look at some of their findings:

• "Only 8% of Americans reported using social networks to learn about campaigns during the 2008 election cycle."
• "The Facebook community is skewed in favor of college educated, more affluent, white, urban and younger citizens. The closer a congressional district resembles this profile, the larger the pool is from which to draw potential Facebook supporters."
• The candidate with the most Facebook supporters tends to win the election, but this does not mean Facebook support is predictive. The community is too demographically skewed for this to be considered an accurate measure.
• 79% of Democratic House Candidates had a Facebook Supporter page in 2008, compared to just 66% of Republican House Candidates.
• Facebook was decidedly NOT a tool of insurgents in 2008. "Fully 93.2% of incumbents had Politicians’ Pages, while only 70.8% of candidates for open seats did so, and the percentage for challengers drops to 48.9%."
• Incumbency and money (more media exposure) were factors in the number of supporters a candidate had on Facebook. Incumbents typically had over 165 more supporters than challengers.
• On average, Democratic candidates had 120 more supporters than Republicans.
• More college educated voters in a district tend to increase the number of Facebook supporters in a race, while a greater percentage of young people generally decreases the number of Facebook supporters for incumbents. (To be perfectly honest, this is SUPER counterintuitive and the authors do a terrible job of explaining what this means or how they come to this conclusion.)
• More activity on the page (from the candidate or from supporters) tends to increase the number of total supporters. Wall posts and videos are the most effective forms of activity for expanding a support base. Fan photos had little effect in growing a support base.
• The average congressional campaign grew its FaceBook fanbase at a rate of 4 - 6% per month.