We had an opportunity last week to discuss how Republicans have been using social media and automated social sharing to drive user engagement at their national convention. In a CNBC social media blog post Wednesday, Patrick Sweeney outlined how the social media landscape had changed since 2008. The data he cites from App Annie and other sources shows that Republicans have closed the gap and maybe taken a slight lead over Democrats. It is no surprise that social media was a hot topic at the Democratic National Convention this week.
Big Twitter Numbers for the President
The President broke the Tweets per Minute (TPM) record last night during his convention acceptance speech reaching 57,757. Romney's TPM topped out at 14,289. Obama's Twitter Political Index lead of 52 to Romney's 9 seems safe and may grow. Further cementing Obama's Twitter dominance over his political rival is the impressive lead he has of 19,443,949 followers today to 1,063,070 as of this writing. But maybe these numbers don't tell the entire story.
If you look at the ratio of TPM to followers, Romney's convention performance looks better. He achieved 0.013 TPM per follower, which is more than 4 times higher than Obama's 0.003 TPM per follower. Obama is definitely getting more messaging out overall, but Romney is showing how your can do more with less. I will let the pundits decide which is better. I'm sure they will have an unbiased opinion.
Facebook Numbers Tell a Different Story
As Social Media matures and more data becomes available we are learning about how different platforms can deliver insight. Facebook launched an intriguing service this year in partnership with CNN called Election Insights. The data aggregates Facebook activity mentioning the competing Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates. It leverages data behind the "Talking About This" metric that you may have noticed on Facebook brand pages next to the number of page "Likes." It is supposed to indicate the level of engagement a topic has at a given time on Facebook.
Not surprisingly, Election Insights shows that this morning, the President is the most talked about in all but two states:
Figure 1 September 7, 2102
(blue indicates talking about Obama whereas red indicates talking about Romney)
You will also note in the pie chart to the right that about 75% of the conversation is about the President compared to Romney. This map is actually better than the Republican showing last Friday morning (Figure 2) which shows a Republican advantage by number of states, but the pie chart indicating more slightly more Obama discussion.
Figure 2 August 31, 2012
Of course the Republicans probably peaked on August 29, 2012 with their near dominance of the Facebook chatter map among women after Ann Romney's speech.
Figure 3 August 29, 2012
Even more interesting is a look at these statistics over the past seven days (Figure 4) since the end of the Republican National Convention. If you look at the map and pie chart for total conversation mentions you see that Republicans actually improved over the week despite the face that Democrats dominated the news cycles from their convention in Charlotte, NC. It is remarkable that Republicans have so effectively held up in the social chatter and appear to be extending their engagement with the over 55 crowd.
Figure 4 August 31 - September 7, 2012
We should acknowledge that a candidate gaffe could skew the numbers at some point and generate a lot of conversation going that are predominantly negative. That is precisely why this week is a good one to analyze because there were no major gaffes.
Organic User Engagement Over Social Broadcast
So why should consumer products companies care about social media and the Presidential campaigns? There are two lessons here that signal a shift in social media strategy.
- Engagement can trump Likes and Followers
- User Generated Content has more power than Broadcast Content
You can have the most "Likes" or "Followers" but if people are not engaged talking about your brand, the impressions you get are fleeting. The Romeny team has shown that creating an environment where smaller numbers of people post, comment and share more often can help to close a big audience gap.
Obama has over a 4 to 1 advantage on Romney in number of "Likes" on his Facebook page, but actually trails the "Talking about This" stat by around 300,000. That deficit translates into a Romney advantage of as much as 69 million Facebook impressions over the President related to the campaign over seven days. Think about what this could mean for your brand and your social media strategy. Ongoing engagement has a big payoff in terms of ongoing brand impressions.
The other thing we see for sure is that content broadcasted by companies or campaigns cannot compete with user generated content for total reach. If you post a message to 19 million followers it doesn't have the same reach as 300,000 people posting something to all of their followers.
We shouldn't draw direct parallels in all instances between political and brand communications. The dynamics have many differences. However, we often see politics borrowing ideas from Madison Avenue because practitioners recognize that techniques can be effective in both spheres. In this instance, our lesson as corporate marketers is that social engagement has a tangible payoff beyond the "Like."
Do you measure engagement or still rely on Likes? Comment below.