Facebook, Causes Helping to Get Out the Vote on Election Day

November 4th, 2008

By Justin Smith

It’s election day in the US, and Facebook is buzzing with election-related activity. On the home page this morning, Facebook greeted US users with a voter count and the opportunity to publish a feed item encouraging friends to vote:

As of 10am PT, nearly 2 million users had already shared that they voted with their friends on Facebook.

Millions of Facebook users have also “donated their status” to the Causes application to remind their friends to vote. Causes is publishing messages like the following for users who authorized the app to publish a status message for them on election day:

As of 10am PT, over 1.5 million Facebook users had donated their status to Causes. Over 14 million users have partipated in Causes in the last 30 days leading up to the election:

Clearly, Facebook and Facebook applications are playing a major role in getting out the vote this year.

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6 Responses to “Facebook, Causes Helping to Get Out the Vote on Election Day”

blazespinnaker Says:
November 4th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Woah.

Be fascinating to follow the money on this one.

Causes is one of those apps that poured major cash into advertising for what looks like very little revenue or even long term revenue.

The facebook demographic is probably hugely for Obama. So if soft money wanted to make a difference, it would engineer a way to get Facebook out to vote.
David Says:
November 4th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
This is great. The only way that college students will not be ignored by politicians is if we have a high voter turnout. I hope that Facebook will help to get the UK student voters out also.
Shaping Youth » New Media, The “Youth Vote” And Generation “We” Says:
November 6th, 2008 at 2:23 am
[...] chose to ‘donate my status’ and track the use of new media in this historic election, but as usual, did it the maverick vs. [...]
How to use your status updates profitably? « Windchimes - a social media agency Says:
December 13th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
[...] – You can donate your status as evident in the campaign that Facebook carried out to urge Americans to come out and vote. This created a huge movement and [...]
Facebook Making Voting Viral on Election Day in Iran Says:
June 12th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
[...] fall, Facebook helped get out the vote on election day in the United States with a special home page promotion in which over 2 million people shared with their friends that [...]
How to use your status updates profitably? | Indian Social Media Landscape Says:
August 1st, 2009 at 1:14 am
[...] – You can donate your status as evident in the campaign that Facebook carried out to urge Americans to come out and vote. This created a huge movement and [...]