Study finds 22 percent of voters have revealed their picks on social media

Roughly 22 percent of registered voters have taken to Facebook, Twitter and other social networking websites to tell their friends and followers how they cast their ballots, a study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported on Tuesday. 

Voters under 50 years of age were more vocal about announcing their voting selections on Facebook and Twitter than seniors, Pew found. Around 29 percent of voters who are 50 years old and under announced how they voted on social media, compared with 17 percent of voters over 50.  

The study also found that people are using Facebook posts and tweets to convince others to vote for their candidate of choice. Around 30 percent of registered voters said they've been encouraged by family and friends to vote for either President Obama or Mitt Romney via posts on social media sites in the last 30 days.

Although social media use has become more ubiquitous, the bulk of registered voters — around 48 percent — said they've been encouraged to vote for a particular presidential candidate in face-to-face conversations with family and friends during the last 30 days, Pew reported. That's compared with 29 percent of voters who received such messages via phone conversations and 21 percent who were encouraged to back a candidate by friends and family over email.

Pew said it didn't find a partisan tilt when it came to people posting their get-out-the-vote messages and "equal shares of registered voters were encouraged by their friends to vote for each candidate in each kind of communication," including social media, email and in-person conversations.

Overall, around one-fifth of registered voters said they've encouraged their friends and family to go vote on Facebook and Twitter.

For the survey, nearly 1,011 adults living in the United States were interviewed by telephone from Nov. 1-4.

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