Election Insights: Facebook and CNN’s real-time display tool

Facebook and international news outfit CNN have unveiled Facebook-CNN Election Insights, following their partnership earlier this month to bring a “uniquely social experience” to this year’s US elections. A tool that displays the real-time number of people talking about the candidates for the election.

Facebook-CNN Election Insights displays dynamic, real-time charts and visualisations using Facebook Insights to gauge the volume of Facebook activity surrounding the election and candidates. The news network will use the tool, which also allows people to view data by geography and demography, during their coverage of the presidential election.

Through social integration platform Mass Relevance, Facebook and CNN have created an experience that allows people 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

Facebook-CNN Election Insights will be used during CNN broadcasts, including regular segments on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” as well as in CNN.com and CNN Mobile campaign coverage. Notably, CNN’s daily “Political Gut Check” newsletter and the U.S. Politics on Facebook Page will feature highlights from the tool.

“We are excited to build on our long relationship with Facebook to transform social media conversation into real-time data,” said CNN Digital SVP KC Estenson. “By teaming up with Facebook and Mass Relevance, we can effectively gauge the buzz surrounding this election and deliver it to CNN Digital users, literally as it’s happening.”

“Facebook is naturally a place where friends engage in political discourse, and we’re pleased to announce that the Facebook-CNN Election Insights tool will offer an interactive, real-time glimpse into how and where this conversation is taking place across the country,” said Elliot Schrage, Vice President of Corporate Communications & Public Policy at Facebook.

The Facebook-CNN Election Insights tool is powered by Facebook Insights and was designed and developed by Mass Relevance, a social integration firm that specializes in the curation and display of real-time social content.

Facebook-CNN Election Insights uses Facebook Page Insights and the metric “People Talking About This” (PTAT), supplemented with aggregate mentions, to gauge the volume of unique people talking about the candidates on Facebook each day. The data provided is aggregate and anonymous. The basic version of PTAT displayed on every Facebook Page is based on users’ “likes” (of a page, a page post, or other page content), comments, and tags over the last seven days.