Not one to be left in the dust with its competition, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) said on Monday it will launch a Facebook-CNN Election Insight tool. This comes on the heels of Twitter’s previously-announced Political Index tool, which tracks sentiment around the upcoming November presidential vote.
According to Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s press release, the tool will display a real-time number of people discussing President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and his selected vice presidential running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan.
The social media giant is working with Mass Relevance, the social integration platform. With CNN, Facebook’s new tool will enable members to:
- View trends about how many people are talking about each of the candidates across the United States.
- Understand distinctions between who is talking about which candidates in those states — male vs. female, and by age group.
- Contribute to the ongoing conversation via a Facebook Comments plug-in.
- “Like” the overall Election Insights, CNN Politics, Obama, Romney, Biden, and Ryan Facebook Pages
In addition, the tool can be utilized during CNN broadcasts, such as CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer”, along with CNN.com and CNN Mobile campaign coverage. Futhemore, CNN’s daily “Political Gut Check” newsletter and the U.S. Politics on Facebook Page will also include highlights from this new tool.
Ok, so how does this differ from Twitter’s political tool?
Their tool utilizes the index to determine what people on Twitter are feeling about the candidates and then in the ensuing days, predict an outcome based on mood changes.
The site has a partnership with with Topsy’s data analysis team and the polling firms of The Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research.
In a Twitter blog post, it further explained, “Each day, the Index evaluates and weighs the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Obama or Romney relative to the more than 400 million Tweets sent on all other topics. For example, a score of 73 for a candidate, indicates that Tweets containing their name or account name are on average more positive than 73 percent of all Tweets.”
If either a Facebook or Twitter tool doesn’t strike your fancy, there’s more out there for political junkies. According to The Next Web, there’s also Electionista from Tweetminster, which tracks elections worldwide. It should provide some opportunity to give insight on what people are thinking through a crowd opinion.
And not to be excluded, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has recently launched its Election Heat Map and the Xbox Live section has Microsoft’s Election 2012.
