ABSTRACT:
From the strategy employed by Barak Obama and his team in the 2008 United States elections, it became evident that social media can be decisive in the outcome of elections. This seemed to have motivated the adoption of social media campaigns in other countries of the world. Nigeria witnessed active social media campaigns for the first time in its 2011 elections. The social media campaign strategy in the 2015 presidential election in Nigeria was more refined and sophisticated than the previous election. This paper examines the use of social media in the 2015 Nigerian presidential election, using data mined from Twitter with R Language in the accompanying R Studio environment, and compares it with the 2008 United States presidential election and the 2010 general elections in the United Kingdom, outlining events in the considered elections that increased the likelihood of electoral victory and those events that diminished the chances of victory.
Keywords:
Unstructured data, Data mining, social media, political campaign, elections, Nigeria, #NigeriaDecides
