Maine Public interviews Rosenbaum, Brewer about social media use in campaigns
University of Maine professors Judith Rosenbaum and Mark Brewer spoke with Maine Public for the report, “How Maine campaigns are turning to social media to woo voters.” “If you want to target, you know, University of Maine students who might lean Democrat, then you will need to know exactly how they communicate, when they’re online, when they are paying attention,” said Rosenbaum, a communications professor who has studied social media use, particularly Twitter. Rosenbaum said what you tweet and retweet, and who you choose to follow can all be mined as part of an effort to determine how you are likely to vote. But, she said, users tend to form their own communities with identifiable hash tags, and collating and analyzing all that data can get expensive. Plus, social media cannot reach everybody. She added there are still a lot of places in Maine that don’t have affordable broadband access, and many older voters are not online. Brewer, a political science professor, said while some state candidates have dabbled in social media advertising, they don’t appear to be as invested in the strategy as are campaigns at the national level. “Maybe the ads themselves don’t cost all that much, but getting that level of sophistication in access to data, that does cost,” he said.