Republican Presidential Candidate Elections Social Media Update 2

Takeaway: The Santorum social media surge matches the surge in popularity in the polls as he beats all other candidates in every social media benchmark tracked by Unmetric.

• In the past week Santorum has achieved a higher fan growth rate, added more fans, posted more often and has the best engagement compared to the other three candidates.
• Gingrich’s social media efforts seem to have stalled, only managing to add just over a third of the number of fans compared to Ron Paul
• All candidates saw lower growth rates and engagement scores this week compared to last week even though Romney, Paul and Gingrich made slightly more posts compared to last week
• Ron Paul continues to be unexceptional in social media, reflecting his performance in the polls, despite a loud and voracious online following

Fan Growth

Taken in isolation the fan growth is not a great indicator but compared and benchmarked against competitors and the sector as a whole the social media manager can see how well the candidates are reaching more people as the campaign rolls on.

As a recent poll has shown, it’s clear that more and more voters are backing Santorum as the other candidates have pulled out of the race rather than voters shifting preference from one of the other three candidates. This is reflected in his continuing astronomical rate of adding new fans.

A comparison of growth rates from this week and the previous week show that even though all the candidates had a lower growth, Santorum still remains light years ahead. Romney’s social media manager might be concerned that his page only scored an increase of 0.75% compared to the previous week.

Gingrich is struggling to add new fans and attract new supporters, reflecting recent polls. Ron Paul can’t seem to translate his social media followings in to hard results in the polls or the caucuses.

Engagement

There’s no point having a million fans if you’re not able to get them talking about you, as you probably know the way to get your posts seen on the news feed of your fans is to have good engagement. As with all the other metrics we are tracking, Santorum is leading the way with engaging his fans although all candidates have lower engagement scores compared to last week. Romney, struggling to maintain his growth rate is also struggling to effectively engage his fans, if the social media manager for his campaign is seeing this then he might want to take a look at the content strategy of the other three candidates!

Admin Posts

There’s a fine line between posting too much and posting too little but it seems that when it comes to Republican presidential candidates more is definitely better. Santorum is posting an average of 10 posts per day and getting huge amounts of engagement from that strategy whereas Gingrich is taking a more surgical approach with less posts but each post is driving a lot more engagement compared to Romney and Paul.

Will Santorum’s surge continue? Can Romney engage his fans better? Can Ron Paul come up with something exceptional? Will Gingrich manage to restart his stuttering social media efforts? We’ll be here next week with more indepth analysis.

All data has been compiled and analyzed from the Unmetric application which tracks dozens of metrics to enable brands to benchmark themselves against competitors and their industry sector. Gain access to all this data by claiming a 15 day free trial.