People who post political posts or tweets online are often involved in politics in their normal life too, says a research.
It means that political discussions conducted on social networking sites like Facebook mirror traditional offline discussions and do not provide a window to previously untapped participants in the political process.
"We find that people who are using Facebook, Twitter or whatever else for political activities, are really the same people who are politically active offline anyway," said Patrick Miller, assistant professor of political science at the University of Kansas.
Facebook as a political strategy is vastly over-rated.
"Social media is not effective at mobilising people who would not otherwise be politically motivated," Miller continued.
It does not persuade people to vote for you and it does not get out the vote by itself.
"But if a campaign could somehow know who are those social connectors out there, then those are the people they should use to disseminate their messages," the authors wrote.
The study involved a survey of discussions conducted on Facebook and offline. The study does provide some insight into how people are discussing politics among their social ties.
Better connected Facebook users or "friend collectors" who have lots of direct social ties are more uncomfortable talking with people whose political views they disagree with or are unfamiliar with.
These users said they were more likely to tailor their Facebook privacy settings so that friends who disagreed with them politically could not see their political status updates or political discussions.
"For the friend collector, Facebook is just an echo chamber where they are choosing to engage with like-minded people and having those opinions reinforced," Miller said.
However, "gatekeepers" who connect groups of people who are otherwise not connected to each other were more comfortable discussing politics on Facebook with friends who had different political opinions.
Even though the study found that social media platforms do not break new ground among political discussion forums, it could still benefit political strategists if they have a way to target gatekeepers.
The paper appeared in the journal Political Research Quarterly.
