Obama vs. Turkish politicians: Who fares better on social media?

Thanks to effective usage of social media, 2008 elections wrote Obama’s name into history. Coming from one of the top countries in terms of social media, are politicians in Turkey able to use it to full effect?

“We just made history,” tweeted the campaign managers of Barack Obama four years ago, a reference, among other things, to the effective use of social media throughout the Obama campaign. If John F. Kennedy was the first American president to have used the new medium, television, to his advantage, Obama was the first one to use social media, successfully managing a flourishing grassroots campaign.

Regardless of who becomes the next occupant of the White House, the U.S. presidential elections tomorrow will not be the elections that made history. It was the 2008 elections. “If not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president or even the democratic nominee,” Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post website boldly said following Obama’s win in 2008.

The Obama campaign had limited funding, which might have been a crucial reason for them to embrace social media from very early on. Instead of spending millions on TV ads, digital savvy cohorts of Obama energized their presence in social media. The estimated 14.5 million hours of viewing on YouTube during the campaign, according to American political consultant Joe Trippi, would have cost $47 million on TV.

Click here for full article (Hürriyet Daily News)