Twitter Statistics from the Political Conventions...
In keeping with our series on Social Media and Presidential Politics: 2012, here are some quick stats for posterity's sake from the Republican and Democratic national conventions over the past two weeks...
- Number of tweets per minute during their convention speech:
Barack Obama | 52,756 |
Michelle Obama | 28,003 |
Bill Clinton | 22,087 |
Joe Biden | 17,932 |
Mitt Romney | 14,289 |
Paul Ryan | 6,669 |
Gabrielle Giffords (reciting the Pledge of Allegiance) | 3,278 |
- Additionally, the entire Democratic convention received over 10 million tweets, while the Republican convention received roughly 4 million. However, to put this in context, the MTV Music Video Awards received 15 million, or more than both conventions combined.
- On the Twitter Political Index, a tool that monitors not only the number of tweets but the positive or negative sentiment behind them, Obama was leading Romney 52 - 9 when the conventions came to a close last Thursday.
- The most mentioned topics on Facebook over the past two weeks, in order, were 1) President Obama's speech, 2) the Democratic National Convention, 3) Bill Clinton's speech, and 4) the Republican National Convention. Clint Eastwood's RNC speech came in at #7. Mitt Romney's speech came in at #10.
We'll have to see if a pattern emerges over several election cycles at different levels of government before we can claim that such statistics are predictive indicators of election outcomes. Or of anything, for that matter.