Still The King Of Digital Campaigning

In the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama went digital in a big way -- appealing to prospective donors on the internet. And it worked, especially in reaching out to younger voters and in getting new donations for the campaign. In fact, it was such a success that the Republicans (and candidate Willard Mitt Romney) decided they would make an effort to do the same.

The Pew Research Center decided to check and see how each of the candidates was doing this year in digital campaigning. During the days between June 4th and 17th of this year they made a study of campaign websites (&blogs), and also looked at Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (these last three weren't used much in the 2008 campaign, but are playing a much larger role in 2012).

As the charts above show, both candidates are using Facebook about equally, with Romney having 34 posts during the period studied and Obama having about 27 (with both candidates averaging about 2 Facebook posts each day). But in the other three types of digital campaigning, President Obama wins hands down. The biggest discrepancy was in the use of Twitter, where the Obama campaign posted 404 times to only 16 times for the Romney campaign (an average of 29 posts daily for Obama and only 1 each day for Romney). The candidate website blogs also showed more use by the Obama campaign, as they had 106 posts to only 55 for Romney (an average of 8 daily posts to 4 daily posts).

The use of YouTube also showed Obama with a 2 to 1 daily average. During the period studied, the Obama campaign had posted YouTube videos 21 times to only 10 times for the Romney campaign. The Romney campaign is making an effort to get into the digital campaigning game this year, but not on the same level that the Obama campaign is operating. At least so far this year, Obama is still the king of internet campaigning.

And the response from the public on the internet strongly favors President Obama (as the chart below shows). Both Facebook and YouTube show approximately a 2 to 1 advantage of people responding to the Obama campaign over the Romney campaign. And Twitter is even more tilted toward Romney. The retweets for Obama are more than 17 times the number of retweets for Romney. This could well be because young people get more of their information from the internet, and are more prolific in their use of the internet -- and young people prefer Obama over Romney by a substantial margin.

This does not mean the election will be decided by internet campaigning, but it certainly doesn't hurt to have an online presence (especially if you are trying to reach out to the younger generation). I suspect that future elections will be decided much more by digital campaigning, but it is starting to make a difference even now -- and the master of internet campaigning is Barack Obama.