Convention-al Social Media

As Election Day nears, pollsters release more and more estimates in the race to the White House—there are national polls, state-by-state polls, and polls involving specific demographic characteristics. We know which candidate is seen as “more likeable,” whose wife is the favorite, and we can even find out which candidate Americans think is more capable of handling an alien invasion (President Obama has the lead on this one).

The real race, and the real competition—one that is fairly new in politics—is the social media one. Not surprisingly, the Republican and Democratic National Conventions that took place during the past two weeks were all over the Internet, and a lot was said about each of the parties and their presidential candidates.  Let’s take a closer look at the numbers:

The Republican Convention in Social Media

• More than four million tweets
• Peak of 14,743 tweets per minute at a single point
• Over 2.5 million YouTube views of speeches and other pieces from Tampa
• Over 300,000 hours of streaming video was viewed, with an average view time of over 30 minutes
• Romney’s speech reached 14,289 tweets per minute

The Democratic Convention in Social Media

• More than 3 million tweets on just the first night
• First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech peaked at 28,003 tweets per minute
• 496,222 tweets during former President Bill Clinton’s 48-minute speech
• Over 9 million tweets about the DNC were sent in total
• President Obama’s speech drove a record 52,757 tweets per minute

According to a recent Vocus.com blog post, many mentions of President Obama are from the Republican campaign. Mentions of Romney are likely to include a mention of Obama as well, but most Obama posts do not bring up Romney. The blog post also discusses the most talked about campaign issues in social media. It’s no surprise that taxes are atop the list with 19% of mentions, with the budget, education, economy and health care behind it. The President also has many more followers on social media websites than his opponent. President Obama has over 28 million Facebook likes while Mitt Romney has 6 million, and Obama has more than 19 million Twitter followers to Romney’s 1 million.

To learn which speakers and topics created the most social media buzz during the conventions, check out these infographics from PBS for each day of the Republican and Democratic conventions.

If you want to learn more about the best social media from the campaign trail, please join us for our next Advocacy Leaders Network event on September 21st, titled “Learning the Lessons of Campaign 2012 and Transforming them to an Advocacy World.”