Social Media and Presidential Politics: 2012

Our inaugural post for this upcoming election year has to, inevitably, focus on today's Iowa caucuses.

Four years ago, The Nerfherder began a series of posts examining to what extent online social media could be a meaningful predictor of electoral outcomes. The results showed that it was, in fact, pretty poor at doing so. Read this post from just after 2008's Super Tuesday for primaries and caucuses and see just where things stood. In retrospect, it's quite fascinating.

We're going to research this question again over the next 10 months and see if we get the same results. But, oh my, how the cyber-times have changed since 2008. In that election cycle, we used as our metrics MySpace friends, Digg friends, Facebook fans, and Technorati blog posts. Isn't that quaint?

Obviously, some updating is in order. This time around we're going to keep track of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Twitter mentions, and occasionally even sprinkle in some Google+ fans.

So here we go. On this day of the Iowa caucuses, here's how things currently stand in online social media among the Republican presidential candidates...


Facebook fans:

Mitt Romney	1,259,515
Ron Paul	672,483
Michelle Bachmann	460,336
Newt Gingrich	223,558
Rick Perry	179,966
Rick Santorum	40,895
Jon Huntsman	30,622

Twitter followers:

Newt Gingrich	1,386,258
Mitt Romney	224,598
Ron Paul	151,899
Michele Bachmann	127,312
Rick Perry	112,272
Rick Santorum	57,520
Jon Huntsman	67,168

Twitter mentions in the past week:

Ron Paul	276,948
Mitt Romney	67,597
Rick Santorum	57,183
Newt Gingrich	46,087
Rick Perry	41,695
Michele Bachmann	16,798
Jon Huntsman	7,166