Election Day

Since today is election day, I knew there would be a lot of social media related to the election. I did not expect the magnitude of the posts and tweets about the election, however. As I looked at my Facebook news feed today, it was very rare that I came along a post that was not about voting. Most of these posts simply encouraged others to vote, rather than providing any relevant information about the candidates, how to vote, or why voting is actually important. This seemed strange to me, because as far as I knew, everyone already knew it was election day, or at least didn't need to see their whole news feed filled with statuses telling them to go vote to be able to realize that it is election day. This made me start thinking about the importance of social media such as Facebook and Twitter in the election. Did all of the statuses about voting actually encourage a large number of people to vote that wouldn't have originally?