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Social media has come about to play a major role in nearly all events of global significance. The U.S. presidential elections are no exception. With the start of voting less than a day away, Facebook is ramping up for a major social media buzz on the election day.

The whole Facebook effort will be primarily focused on alerting the U.S.-based users who are of voting age. The alert will be dished out in the form of a message which would be served right on top of the users’ news feeds.

Once a user responds to this message by clicking that he has cast his vote, this will be shared on his Timeline and thus, his contacts will also be able to see that. In the past, it has been found out that peer pressure can lead people to cast votes. So if Facebook’s social media campaign gathers traction, it can help bolster the election turnout.

Facebook is also planning to extend the scope of this campaign to its mobile users. As it is, a major chunk of Facebook’s overall traffic now comes from mobile devices. So the social network intends to roll out messages to these users, informing them about election updates as well as pinging them to cast their votes.

Real-time map of voting trends:
Facebook has devised a special feature exclusively for the election day. The feature will include the voting locations around the country and the number of Facebook users who have cast votes at each of these locations. The feature can be then be used to gauge the trends of voting among Facebook users.

Talk Meter for election day:
Talk Meter is a feature which essentially measures the buzz surrounding a given event or specific topics. Facebook team plans on using the feature to discern the popularity of election-related topics and trends on the social media. The meter ascribes a number between 1 and 10 to the topics it includes.

With the far and wide proliferation of the social media, it is no wonder that Facebook has so much planned for the U.S. presidential elections. The event is certainly of huge significance, not only in U.S. but also internationally. And it is only natural that Facebook users would be eager to learn of the latest updates about it.

Source: Facebook US Politics Page

Courtesy: CNET

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