• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, November 4, 2010

In a testament to the growing reach and engagement of social media, online traffic to social networks increased between the 2008 general elections and the 2010 midterm elections on Tuesday, as reflected in a number of metrics.

Before looking at social stats, it's no surprise that Internet traffic overall surged on Tuesday, according to Akamai Technologies, which said activity peaked at 5.7 million page views per minute in the evening, 32.5% higher than the 2008 peak of 4.3 million page views per minute. The 2010 peak subsided to about 3.25 million page views per minute at noon EST on Wednesday, which is still about 7% above the Internet's recent average of 3.05 million page views per minute.

During the peak on Tuesday evening, North America contributed the lion's share of traffic -- 3.3 million page views per minute. Still, at 6 p.m. 42% of people reading news online were outside North America, indicating a high degree of foreign interest in the midterm elections, according to Akamai. On the other hand, to offer some perspective it's worth noting that both U.S. elections are dwarfed by the Internet's all-time record traffic on June 24 of this year, when World Cup qualifying matches coincided with Wimbledon, generating 10.4 million page views per minute.

In terms of social media traffic, over 12 million people posted status updates on Facebook saying they voted -- up 120% from 2008, when 5.44 million people reported voting on Facebook. While this is impressive, over the same period Facebook's total membership surged from about 120 million to about 550 million, an increase of roughly 360%, so political engagement on the site has actually lagged overall growth. Part of the explanation may be the fact that most of the site's growth over the last two years has been abroad: U.S. users grew 240% from 41 million in September 2008 to 139 million in September 2010, according to comScore, while non-U.S. users grew 420% from 79 million to 411 million over the same period.

Meanwhile location-based social networks also posted stats on user engagement, although comparison with 2008 isn't possible because they didn't exist yet. During Tuesday's elections 50,000 people checked in at polling places on Foursquare to claim the limited-edition "iVoted" badge. Of course, this is a small fraction (0.4%) of the number of Facebook users who posted a status update saying they voted -- and it's also a pretty small fraction (1.25%) of Foursquare's own total user base of four million.

Maybe the most interesting aspect of the social media-politics nexus is the ability of sites like Facebook to predict winners. According to Facebook, "The Facebook political team's initial snapshot of 98 House races shows that 74 percent of candidates with the most Facebook fans won their contests. In the Senate, our initial snapshot of 19 races shows that 81 percent of candidates with the most Facebook fans won their contests."