Luke Skywalker
Super Moderator
{vb:raw ozzmodz_postquote}:
Supporters wave signs for Donald Trump as he speaks during a campaign rally in Pittsburgh on April 13, 2016.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>(Photo: Keith Srakocic, AP)
Here's an intriguing bit of social media data: Since the end of February, Donald Trump has generated greater intensity of Facebook conversation than any other presidential candidate.
Trump has long dominated social media conversation —<span style="color: Red;">*</span>he generated 52 million likes, comments, shares and posts on Facebook a week ago compared with 24 million for Hillary Clinton and 2.5 million for John Kasich<span style="color: Red;">*</span>— but it is only in the past few weeks that he has broken away from the pack in the number of interactions made per Facebook user.
The chart below, with data provided by Facebook,<span style="color: Red;">*</span>tracks this relative "intensity": the total number of interactions about the candidates divided by the number of unique users participating in that conversation. For the week ending April 5, Trump generated 4.6 interactions per user, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both generated 4.2 interactions per user, Ted Cruz generated 4.0 and John Kasich 2.8.
What does all that mean? It is really hard to know.
Obviously intensity level of conversation about the campaign has increased, and intensity has increased for all candidates as the race has heated up, notes Eric Wilson, a digital political strategist who worked for Marco Rubio's campaign this year. But there is no way to evaluate the sentiment of this intensity, he notes. "I imagine that there are a lot of intense feelings about Donald<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Trump<span style="color: Red;">*</span>from people who are supportive of him and from<span style="color: Red;">*</span>people who don't<span style="color: Red;">*</span>like him," Wilson said.
Wilson noted that since it measures<span style="color: Red;">*</span>comments-per-user instead of raw volume, "this is one of the only social media graphs where we would see Donald<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Trump and John Kasich on the same scale."
In fact, until<span style="color: Red;">*</span>June 2015 — before either man had announced a presidential bid — Kasich was generating more Facebook intensity than Trump. In July, USA TODAY reported that Ted Cruz generated the highest level of intensity on Facebook on the day of his presidential announcement of any presidential candidate, with Scott Walker a close second.
On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders led Clinton in intensity for most of last year, but she caught up at the end of October and their numbers have risen in tandem ever since.
David Goodsmith, with the data analytics firm DataScience, noted that the intensity of Clinton's Facebook conversation increased through March even as the total volume of conversation about her trended downward. The trend lines could indicate "decreasing degree of interactions overall after Wisconsin, but with a heightened intensity by supporters as New York approached," Goodsmith said. "Were only interactions viewed, the general downwards trend might miss the important uptick in intensity."
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