Donald Trump’s Facebook campaign leads Hillary Clinton’s by a large margin, building on Twitter strength
Donald Trump rip-roars his way through social media, keeping Hillary Clinton’s Campaign in a tight spot. An average official Trump Facebook page [1] post published after August 1st 2015, when the primary campaigning began, attracts on average a staggering 72,058 likes. An average Hillary Clinton Facebook page [1] post garners 14,691 likes, or five times less. The pattern is replicated for comments and shares. Throughout the primaries campaign, Donald Trump’s page attracted a staggering 149 million likes to Hillary Clinton’s 19 million.
Donald Trump’s success is not an accident, but a result of his buildup to the campaign, which started long before August 2015. Donald Trump’s Facebook page had garnered before August 2015 more than twice (2.3) as many likes per average post as Hillary Clinton’s. An average Donald Trump page posts had attracted 18,748 likes, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 7,943 .
The story, is again, similar for likes and shares even before August 2015.
Donald Trump’s indomitable presence on Facebook mirrors and amplifies his dominance on Twitter [3], where he leads by two million followers (9.4 to Hillary’s 7.4) and gets twice as many retweets per total and per average post.
Trump is also more often to be found in Google searches, especially those related to news, as data from Google Trends indicate.
The manner in which he dominates social media is surprising, since he and his campaign are working with a handicap. Both Facebook and Twitter (especially the later) are dominated by younger and more educated demographic groups, which tend to favor Hillary. His success indicates more intense work or success in keeping the message fresh and edgy.
However, social media is not a be all, end all of a candidate’s presence in the public eye. Public performance and interaction by other means, including broadcast media and press coverage, also play a role, one may say, a defining one. Also, what ultimately matters is not what the social media chatter says, but what the intentions to vote are. According to Real Clear Politics poll of polls [4], Donald Trump has quite a bit to do to close the gap, which in the last few weeks widened for a while only to close again in the last few days. Hillary Clinton dominates the intention race by 3-5%.
However, this does not put her in the “safe” zone. Recently, Nate Silver [5] announced that tracking the polls and other predictive factors, Donald Trump’s chances for electability have increased from under 30% to almost 40%.
The campaign, given the intensity of passions and the public activism, especially on Trump’s side, is thus a moving target that can reserve some surprises.
NOTE ABOUT THE DATA: Analysis was performed using RFacebook and TwitterR packages, which allow direct access to raw posting, commenting, liking, retweeting data. Facebook data included all posts published by the two campaigns between August 1 2015 and July 16 2016. Twitter data covers the period April 15-July 16 2016.
Note
The page was updated to reflect that the results reported here earlier referred to the period preceding August 2015.
Sources
[1] https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/?fref=ts
[2] https://www.facebook.com/hillaryclinton/
[5] http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
