effectiveness of different new media. We expect that campaign insiders will continue to see their websites as inferior to Facebook, email, Twitter, and possibly other social media when it comes to communicating directly with voters. This is because, unlike email and social media, campaign websites present passive information that cannot be directly delivered to those who have joined an email list or subscribed to a social media feed (see, e.g., Bimber, 2014; Gerodimos & Justinussen, 2015). Moreover, this difference in perceived communication capacity should remain stable in 2016 given that the inherent qualities of these media are largely unchanged, even if the importance of different media shifted, the effectiveness (e.g., reach to communicate with voters) should not have changed. We asked respondents to estimate how well campaign websites, email, and various social media worked to communicate with voters in 2014 and 2016 (question not asked from 2008 to 2012). The results in Figure 4 show that respondents saw websites as moderately useful, although significantly less effective than Facebook and email (e.g., comparing email to campaign websites in 2016 gives t93 = 5.090, p = .000). While congressional campaigns used Twitter moderately in 2016, they reported (not shown) much less reliance on YouTube (3.10), Instagram (2.59), LinkedIn (1.73), and other social media (2.18), indicating a nuanced view of social media as a direct communications tool (e.g., comparing campaign websites to Twitter gives t92 = 0.362, p = .718; comparing campaign websites to YouTube gives t91 = 5.806, p = .000). Perhaps campaigns do not see social media with length (Twitter) or written content (Instagram) constraints as particularly effective for communicating with voters. This pattern may also reflect an understanding of social media use in that, according to the Pew Research Center, 79% of online adults use Facebook compared to 32% for Instagram, 29% for LinkedIn, and 24% for Twitter (Greenwood, Perrin, & Duggan, 2016).
effectiveness of different new media. We expect that campaign insiders will continue to see their websites as inferior to Facebook, email, Twitter, and possibly other social media when it comes to communicating directly with voters. This is because, unlike email and social media, campaign websites present passive information that cannot be directly delivered to those who have joined an email list or subscribed to a social media feed (see, e.g., Bimber, 2014; Gerodimos & Justinussen, 2015). Moreover, this difference in perceived communication capacity should remain stable in 2016 given that the inherent qualities of these media are largely unchanged, even if the importance of different media shifted, the effectiveness (e.g., reach to communicate with voters) should not have changed. We asked respondents to estimate how well campaign websites, email, and various social media worked to communicate with voters in 2014 and 2016 (question not asked from 2008 to 2012). The results in Figure 4 show that respondents saw websites as moderately useful, although significantly less effective than Facebook and email (e.g., comparing email to campaign websites in 2016 gives t93 = 5.090, p = .000). While congressional campaigns used Twitter moderately in 2016, they reported (not shown) much less reliance on YouTube (3.10), Instagram (2.59), LinkedIn (1.73), and other social media (2.18), indicating a nuanced view of social media as a direct communications tool (e.g., comparing campaign websites to Twitter gives t92 = 0.362, p = .718; comparing campaign websites to YouTube gives t91 = 5.806, p = .000). Perhaps campaigns do not see social media with length (Twitter) or written content (Instagram) constraints as particularly effective for communicating with voters. This pattern may also reflect an understanding of social media use in that, according to the Pew Research Center, 79% of online adults use Facebook compared to 32% for Instagram, 29% for LinkedIn, and 24% for Twitter (Greenwood, Perrin, & Duggan, 2016).
SSCR%20Article%20March%2020%202017.docx