Radiohead Republicans
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 26th, 2007 6:19 pmThere just aren’t that many of them.
But there are plenty more interested in the Bible, Country music, Sportscenter, watching 24, and playing Halo 3 on their Xbox.
Meanwhile, liberals watch the Daily Show, love Radiohead (by a 6-to-1 margin over conservatives), and let’s just say I like who Stephen Colbert takes votes from.
This is all part of my deep dive into Facebook demographic data provided at by the Flyers Pro advertising engine. . I’ve just updated the spreadsheet. (See part I of this series for more.) The data looks like this:
I’ve also added another column for the percentage of people who specify an ideology (this isn’t perfect since Libertarians are excluded). This is a proxy for how interested politically you are.
The most politically jazzed up constituency are those who say they’re interested in politics (78%), followed by West Wing fans (72%), Capitol Hill staffers (69%), and Daily Show viewers (65%). The least? Those who work at Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google (in the 30s).
People who specify “Politics” as an interest in are 53-25% liberal over conservative as compared to a 9 point liberal lead on the Facebook network.
But Britney Spears fans are 49% to 26% liberal.
If you find this data fascinating and want to help build on it, log into Facebook, go to this page (note: you can only get stats as a Facebook member), and plug in what ever common interest (movie, TV show, pastime, whatever) in the keyword field. Jot down four data points, starting with the number of people who match that interest overall, and the numbers that appear when you tick off the Liberal, Moderate, and Conservative checkboxes. Then post it in the comments.
Could Facebook be the greatest microtargeting engine ever built?
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Excellent post Patrick.
Apple Computers (Only variation that registers; for example, on my profile an interest is “My MacBook Pro.” Perhaps a flaw/bug in the targeting methodology?)
Total: 3,540
Liberal: 1,060
Moderate: 540
Conservative: 520
Broken Social Scene (Indie/Canadian)
Total: 52,200
Liberal: 21,800
Moderate: 5,200
Conservative: 1,540
To go along with your early adopter thesis, it appears the most “mainstream” entertainment choices skew conservative.
American Idol
Total: 360,660
Liberal: 47,360
Moderate: 43,420
Conservative: 72,160
Nickelback
Total: 320,620
Liberal: 39,990
Moderate: 42,940
Conservative: 58,060
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[…] Statistics are wonderful, interesting, useful things (and with this sentence, I think I’ve shown which of the 10,000 folks I am). I was paging through my feeds this evening, glancing over the political headlines, and a posting from from conservative political blogger Patrick Ruffini caught my eye. It was entitled Radiohead Republicans - what looked like a new political catchphrase I hadn’t yet heard of, so I clicked and investigated. […]
[…] What’s a radiohead? […]
[…] Statistics are wonderful, interesting, useful things (and with this sentence, I think I’ve shown which of the 10,000 folks I am). I was paging through my feeds this evening, glancing over the political headlines, and a posting from from conservative political blogger Patrick Ruffini caught my eye. It was entitled Radiohead Republicans - what looked like a new political catchphrase I hadn’t yet heard of, so I clicked and investigated. […]
[…] Patrick Ruffini has an important blog post up as part of his dive in to facebook demographics using the Flyers Pro advertising tool. This is the first time I’ve seen a solid look at the demographics associated with American users. […]
[…] I find political and demographic data can be very fun. (Maybe not as fun as real political games, of course.) In a post called Radiohead Republicans, Patrick Ruffini (an online political strategist) talks about a new way figure out how to microtarget in a campaign. Yep, aggregated Facebook data. And you thought your Facebook page was just an innocent way to network. The data multiplied by millions of other pages just might turn out to be a powerful tool for use in politics - and what is a large part of politics but a branch of marketing? Perhaps that explains part of why Facebook was able to sell a 1.6% stake for $240 million a few days ago. […]