Three-quarters of US adults are internet users, and of these 61% use social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace and 8% use Twitter. As Americans increasingly use these sites to connect with public figures, find out about and respond to events in the news, and share their views on a range of topics, politicians and political groups on both ends of the ideological spectrum have begun using them to organize and communicate with their supporters and the public at large. In our 2010 post-election survey, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project set out to evaluate the current state of political engagement on Twitter and social networking sites.

The results reported here are based on a national telephone survey of 2,257 adults conducted November 3-24, 2010. The survey included 755 interviews conducted on the respondent’s cell phone, and interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.  For results based on internet users, the margin of error is +/-3 percentage points. This is the first non-presidential election in which the Pew Internet project has conducted polling on the use of social networking sites for political purposes, and the first election of any kind in which we asked detailed questions about the use of Twitter for this purpose.

21% of online adults used social networking sites to engage with the 2010 elections

Six in ten online adults use social networking sites such as Facebook or Myspace, and one third (35%) of these social networking site users took to these sites during election season to get political information or to get involved in the campaign. Our definition of political use of social networking sites includes anyone who did one or more of the following activities on these sites in the months leading up to the 2010 elections:

• Discover which candidates your friends voted for this year – 18% of social networking site users did this (this represents 11% of all adult internet users)
• Get candidate or campaign information –14% of social networking site users (9% of all internet users) did this
• Post content related to politics or the campaign – 13% of social networking site users (8% of all internet users) posted their own content on these sites
• Sign up as a friend of a candidate or group involved in the campaign—11% of social networking site users (7% of all internet users) did this in 2010
• Take part in political groups or causes – 10% of social networking site users joined such a group, and 2% started their own group on these sites. This works out to 6% and 1% of internet users, respectively.

Taken together, that means that 35% of all social networking site users got involved politically on these sites during the 2010 elections. That works out to 21% of all adult internet users. Half of these political social networking users took part in one of the six activities we asked about in our survey, while the other half engaged in two or more activities.