“There is going to be a national election that is going to be about the Internet the way that 1960 was about TV for the first time with the Kennedy/Nixon debate.” Marc Andreeson, a prognosticator, told this to reporters as he predicted 2012 as the last ‘social media’ election. And it appears he could be on the right track – spending on Internet ads was prevalent this election.

And it appears to have paid off.  Obama spent much more on online campaigning than Romney, and an info-graphic showed Obama winning the social media election two full months ago.  While Obama and Romney had a comparable amount of Facebook mentions, Obama doubled the amount of YouTube videos and Bing searches and had 25 times the amount of tweets.  He also had at least twice as many Facebook likes, retweets, and YouTube action.

When I first saw this data, I wondered how accurately it would end up reflecting the election results.  After all, I associate most of those sites with the younger generation, which happens to include a larger proportion of Obama supporters.  Although it appeared Obama would be winning by a landslide, perhaps Romney has far more supporters who are not as active on social media sites.

What really caught my eye, along these same lines, was the fact that Obama had 25 times as many Twitter mentions.  This is much more than the two to one lead he had on other social media sites.  However, this makes more sense when considering the demographic of people who use Twitter.  A quarter of all young people (18-29) online have a Twitter account, which is double the rate of 30-49 year olds, and significantly greater than people over 50.  These statistics fit with the voter statistics for people aged 18-29 – 135% more of them reported to have voted for Obama.

So what does this mean for social media statistics? While they may be skewed towards the younger generation’s views, they did end up predicting the outcome of this election, suggesting the views of the younger generation may be reflected in the population of the rest of the country.  Or, it is possible that more of the older generation may be online than we think.