Pew recently studied studied the online activity of the two U.S. presidential campaigns, which includes a presence on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook and posts on their campaigns’ own websites. The Romney campaign is on seven different online platforms, while the Obama campaign is on nine different online platforms, including Pinterest, Instagram and Spotify.
During the two weeks of the study, the Obama campaign published 614 posts across all digital platforms, compared with the Romney campaign’s 168 posts. On Twitter, @BarackObama and @Obama2012 together tweeted an average of 29 times a day, while @MittRomney averaged just one tweet daily, though it was much more even on Facebook where Romney posted 34 times on Facebook compared with Obama’s 27 during the two weeks studied.
In terms of reaction, Obama generated more of it from his followers. He saw an average of 466 likes per video on YouTube compared with 253 likes for Romney, while on Facebook, Obama drew an average 2,938 comments per post compared with 1,941 for Romney.
The Romney campaign asserts @MittRomney tweets only what the governor would really say. “Our Twitter handle is in the guv’s voice from the guv, and he is aware of it,” digital strategist Zac Moffatt says.
Obama’s current number of Facebook likes, 27.8 million, dwarfs Romney’s 4.6 million. The Romney campaign points out that the former governor’s “likes” have been increasing faster than Obama’s and that Romney outscores Obama in Facebook’s tracking of “most talked about” pages, with 1.6 million people compared to 1.4 million.
Other interesting facts: 34 percent of Romney’s posts were about Obama, whereas Obama’s posts only mentioned Romney 14 percent of the time. Both campaigns rarely rely on independent sources to back up their sites, with just 5 percent of links going out to a mainstream news story.
Source: USA Today
