President Obama’s digitally-driven campaign forever changed the way politicians (and their communications teams) approach an election. And just last week, President Obama officially became the first representative of the Office of the President on the Twittershpere with the launch of @POTUS.
Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really! Six years in, they’re finally giving me my own account.
— President Obama (@POTUS) May 18, 2015
It’s easy to tie President Obama’s successful Twitter entry with the acceleration of the 2016 Presidential race. With multiple candidacies announced via social networks, the launch of @POTUS seems to be another validation that digital channels will be a significant battleground for the coming election.
With the 2016 Presidential campaigns heating up, we used the TrackMaven competitive intelligence platform to find out where the candidates are staking their digital claims so far.
Which Candidates Are Tweeting At The Top?
When it comes to Twitter, Hillary Clinton has a clear lead in the size of her audience. Her 3.5 Million Twitter followers dwarves the Twitter audience of both Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, with 740,000 and 620,000 followers, respectively.
Bernie Sanders, the only other Democrat officially in the race, sits at 46,000 below almost all of the Republicans. However, if you combined all of the Republican candidates Twitter audiences, it still wouldn’t be on par with Former Secretary Clinton’s massive following.
When we pull the Twitter engagement data and for the candidates for the past week, his ranking seems to get flipped on its head. Independent Senator-turned-Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is doing best with 3.28 average retweets per 1,000 followers. It’s likely his online audience is engergized by his recent campaign announcement.
With her sea of followers, however, Hillary Clinton’s engagement level sits at the bottom of this list. Normalizing for audience size and posting frequency, her followers are less engaged (.11 average retweets per tweet per 1,000 followers) in the last week than Sanders’, who are likely excited by his more recent campaign announcement. Ben Carson and Ted Cruz follow Sanders in this metric at 1.77 and 1.23 respectively.
Facing the Nation on Facebook
Moving on to Facebook, the playing field is much more even. Despite her large audience on Twitter, on Facebook, Hillary Clinton doesn’t even break the top 5 candidates by follower count. Interestingly, the candidates that are polling behind many of the unannounced candidates seem to lead on Facebook.
This includes the libertarian Rand Paul leading with almost 2 million Page Likes, followed by evangelical Fox-News host Mike Huckabee (1,738,000), former surgeon Ben Carson (1,436,000), and Obamacare filibusterer Ted Cruz (1,246,000). Behind these candidates, Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton are neck-and-neck with 868,000 and 850,000 Facebook fans, respectively.
Our engagement data on Facebook shows us a similar impression on the field as we saw with Twitter, with newer candidates performing the best.
Former New York Governor George Pataki leads with 27.22 avg. interactions per post per 1,000 Facebook fans, followed closely by Carly Fiorina (24.52) and Bernie Sanders (23.42). All three of these candidates launched their campaigns within the past two weeks, with Pataki’s starting officially just a few days ago. As polling data often shows, these early honeymoon boosts in popularity for candidates aren’t always consistent with later performance.
Summing Up
Many of these leading candidates were unable to garner much of a following on Twitter but have found much larger audiences on Facebook. Engagement is difficult to gauge at the moment as candidates are still flowing into the arena. Candidates that are on lower tiers in polling data are able to engage followers on Twitter and Facebook, an area that should be considered seriously by the campaigns now and as the race continues.