Snapshot of Presidential Candidate Social Networking Stats: Nov 3, 2008

Posted on November 3rd, 2008 in: Politics, Social Media Measurement, Social Networking

Tomorrow is the big day, so let’s take a snapshot of the social media campaign results, it took me a few minutes to dive into their profiles and grab numbers. Here’s what I found:

Internet Usage in United States
United States Population: 303,824,646
Internet Usage: 220,141,969
Penetration rate: 72.5%
Growth from 2000-2008: 130.9%
Stats from Internet WorldStats (Census, Nielson)

Facebook
Obama: 2,379,102 supporters
McCain: 620,359 supporters

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

MySpace
Obama: Friends: 833,161
McCain: Friends: 217,811

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

YouTube
Obama: 1792 videos uploaded since Nov 2006, Subscribers: 114,559 (uploads about 4 a day), Channel Views: 18,413,110
McCain: 329 videos uploaded since Feb 2007 (uploads about 2 a day), Subscribers: 28,419, Channel Views: 2,032,993

Obama has 403% more subscribers than McCain
Obama has 905% more viewers than McCain

Twitter
Obama: @barackobama has 112,474 followers
McCain: @JohnMcCain (is it real?) 4,603 followers

Obama has 240 times more followers in Twitter than McCain

Community Platforms/Branded Social Networks
MyBarackObama: I was unable to find total number of registered members (anyone have data?)
McCain Space: I was unable to find total number of registered members (anyone have data?)

Interesting that the ratios between MySpace and Facebook are the same, Youtube nearly the same. I was not able to find data on LinkedIn, they don’t make it easy to find ‘connections’ numbers.

It’s clear that Obama is dominating the social media activity, this could because of two reasons: 1) Obama campaign moved quicker to social networking and soical media, McCain only recently launched his own social network with KickApps. 2) The Social Technographics (behaviors to adopt social media) skew heavier towards demographics, yet these percentages are far greater than the margins shown in technographics.

I’ll link to any other social media campaign analysis, leave a link below –later, if I get time, I’ll try to do a summary.

Related Resources:

  • Forrester’s Josh Bernoff: The social profile of political candidates
  • Pew has some very interesting data about social networks and their influence, many charts
  • Pew Research: The Internet and the 2008 Election, stats and data about usage.
  • Obama campaign bullies MySpace fan out of his namesake as the MySpace Obama page wasn’t started by official Obama campaign