Is there a better reason to break a period of Facebook silence than wishing a friend and colleague a happy birthday? Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took to the social network Tuesday to acknowledge the 43rd birthday of his running mate, Paul Ryan, marking Romney’s first post of 2013 and just his third since Nov. 7, the day after Election Day.
Lisa Raphael (left), the social media producer at Katie Couric's daytime talk show Katie, is one of our featured speakers in Mediabistro's upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an online event and workshop starting June 6, 2013. Lisa will share a case study on how the hit show uses Twitter to build interest and buzz around upcoming segments. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. 
With 2012 drawing to a close, Wednesday was year in review time at Facebook, as the social network released its 2012 Year in Review, as well as instructions for its users to create their own year in review posts.
Reports indicate that former presidential candidate Mitt Romney is experiencing “sustained boredom” following his loss Nov. 6. But the real question is: Will the government let him keep his nearly 12 million Facebook friends to comfort him in his loss? The Facebook pages of both Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, have been largely silent since Election Day, except for a sweet photo of Romney hugging his wife, Ann, that was shared in a Thanksgiving Day post.
President Barack Obama had three times as many Facebook friends as his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, on Election Day, and increased his share of Facebook friends 15 times over from 2008, according to a new list of data that examine the 2012 presidential race by the numbers.
Answer: What is “targeted sharing” on Facebook? The question: How was the Obama campaign going to reach the millions of young people under 29 who had no listed phone numbers and flew under the radar — just out of reach of pollsters and volunteers — using the cellular network to communicate?
Facebook’s Data Science team parsed the 9 million users they say clicked on the I’m Voting application, offering a glimpse into not just who was voting, but sharing, commenting, and liking across Facebook Nov. 6.
What happens to candidates’ Facebook pages after an election? It’s a question no one has really had to address before, but prior to the 2012 election, more than 110,000 political Facebook pages were created, including more than 11,000 for candidates, so it’s hard to ignore. The Washington Post first picked up on the drop in Mitt Romney‘s Facebook fans Friday, when the GOP presidential nominee’s page was hemorrhaging 593 likes per hour.
The 2012 election postmortems continue, and research published in Capitol Hill newspaper Politico indicates that congressional candidates with the social media mettle to engage their Facebook fan bases got much-needed bumps on Election Day.
People all over the U.S. were posting about either President Barack Obama or Republican challenger Mitt Romney on Facebook during Election Day. But buzz about ballots wasn’t limited to the 50 states. Facebook released statistics Wednesday showing that the U.S. presidential election was popular in Canada, the U.K., and Australia.
Now that the 2012 presidential election is in the record books, we can start to examine more closely the role that Facebook played in the first “social election” and how the winners and losers used the platform in the waning hours of the race.
