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Chris, the 2012 election cycle will see the GOP far exceeding the social media expertise of the Democrats. After the 2006/2008 debacle when the GOP ignored “new” media and lost the House and then, the White House, the Republicans have learned, dominate on Twitter, Facebook and the Right’s own message boards, like at FreedomWorks.

Now, the Republican National Committee has added a tech guru to its team.

Game on…..

With all of the changes in Facebook and Google Plus, I thought I would post up the latest of my contacts on social media:

Twitter: Follow Flap on Twitter

Google Plus: Follow Me on Google Plus

Facebook:

Thanks to Katie Harbath of Facebook for the heads up on this report. Here is a summary of the findings:

• Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans’ time online, now accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet
• At over 53 billion total minutes during May 2011, Americans spend more time on Facebook than they do on any other website
• Tumblr is an emerging player in social media, nearly tripling its audience from a year ago
• Nearly 40 percent of social media users access social media content from their mobile phone
• Internet users over the age of 55 are driving the growth of social networking through the Mobile Internet
• 70 percent of active online adult social networkers shop online, 12 percent more likely than the average adult Internet user
• Across a sample of 10 global markets, social networks and blogs are the top online destination in each country, accounting for the majority of time spent online and reaching at least 60 percent of active Internet users

More and more people that are my age are embracing social media, especially Facebook. Now, since most employers block social media sites during work hours from their company computers and with the advent of powerful Smart Phones, it makes sense that these more senior internet users are using their phones and the mobile internet.

The marketing opportunities will be many to these folks with a lot of disposable cash.

The entire report is here.

Not really surprising since the LEFT has been slow to move away from their own blogosphere.

Tea party candidates tweet more frequently than Democrats and even their generic Republican rivals.

That’s the finding of a study out of the University of Michigan, which surveyed 460,000 tweets over a three-year period from 687 candidates running for U.S. House, Senate and governor. 

Over the study period, tea party candidates tweeted an average of 901 times compared to 723 times for Republicans and 551 for Democrats.

“The conservative candidates—Republicans and Tea Party members—definitely used Twitter more visibly and showed a more coherent set of messages and topics,” said Eytan Adar, assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “They also followed each other much more closely. I think it’s fair to say they were much more cohesive in a lot of ways and at the end of the day that makes for a stronger campaign.”

The study found that not only did tea party members tweet more often, but they retweeted each other and used hashtags more frequently.

The entire paper is here (Pdf).

We utilize graph and text mining techniques to analyze differences between Democrats, Republicans and Tea Party candidates, and suggest a novel use of language modeling for estimating content cohesiveness. Our findings show significant differences in the usage patterns of social media, and suggest conservative candidates used this medium more effectively, conveying a coherent message and maintaining a dense graph of connections. Despite the lack of party leadership, we find Tea Party members display both structural and language-based cohesiveness.