The spectacular online popularity of a few exceptional candidates like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin has led many to suggest that a new generation of internet tools, and in particular increasingly widely used social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, have given politicians and political campaigns powerful ways of communicating “directly” with the electorate (Bennett and Manheim, 2006; Papacharrissi 2009, Newman 2010). This notion is eagerly fed by social media companies (e.g. Facebook 2010) and social media consultants (e.g. Mashable 2010) themselves. In this paper, we will show that the majority of the many politicians—even in well-funded, competitive, high-stakes elections—who try to use social media are in fact largely ignored by the electorate, and attract very limited numbers of supporters and followers online. Based on a systematic tracking of Democratic and Republican congressional candidates'' web presence across their websites and their profiles on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube in September, October, and November in the 112 most competitive congressional districts in the 2010 U.S. midterm elections, we will demonstrate that the overwhelming majority only managed to reach a small fraction of the electorate using social media. On the basis of this finding, we will suggest that the political implications of the increasing popularity of social media should not be understood primarily on the basis of notions of "direct” communication between candidates and the electorate—something only few politicians manage to generate on a significant scale—but instead with reference to the role social media play (a) institutionally, in organizing smaller groups of more dedicated supporters for campaign and fundraising purposes and (b) indirectly, via social communication about politics, amongst voters themselves.
