Paul Ryan: King of Facebook

CNN reported this week that Rep. Paul Ryan has become the king of Facebook by knocking President Obama off  “the most talked about” list of US politicians.

CNN recently entered into a partnership with Facebook to track things political on the social sharing network and according to the new “Facebook-CNN Election Talk Meter,” in the 54 hours after presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney introduced Rep. Paul Ryan as his choice for the vice presidency, Paul Ryan became the star of social media.

Facebook-CNN talk meter scores

1. Rep. Paul Ryan 5.21
2. President Barack Obama 4.84
3. Vice President Joe Biden 4.01
4. Gov. Mitt Romney 3.74

In fact, Ryan became such a hot topic on social media that he almost matched Olympic swimming star Michael Phelps on the Talk Meter. That is pretty impressive considering how badly politics typically shows up on Internet “top” lists compared to pop culture and sports. As CNN measured it, after Phelps won all his Olympic medals Phelps rated a 6.51 to Ryan’s 5.21 on the 1-10 scale.

Let’s face it, politics usually rates pretty low on Internet “top” lists. Whenever you go to the Yahoo top ten, or the Google top lists, rarely do politicians or political issues show up in the search results. Most of the time you get pop icons like the Kardashians, singers like Miley Cyrus, and the like on such lists. Politicians rarely show unless they are being arrested for something or caught up in a sex scandal. Yet Ryan got big traffic in social media according to CNN.

The “Talk Meter” measures the “buzz” as well as “likes” on Facebook. This was CNN’s first report on the results of its collaboration with the social media giant.

As to Facebook Fan Pages, stats show that Paul Ryan is more popular than Vice President Joe Biden, as well. What is interesting is that Ryan’s gotten more Facebook fans on his fan page than Biden even though Ryan’s page is not yet a month old and Biden’s has been around for years.

Joe Biden

• 355,000 fans currently
• Since August 1: Added 4,200 fans (+1.2%)
• Since Saturday: Added 728 fans (+0.2%)

Paul Ryan

• 501,000 fans currently
• Since August: Fan page didn’t exist
• On Saturday: Added 222,100 fans
• Since Saturday: Added 237,900 fans (+107.1%)

CNN-Facebook also noted that two swing states also rated high in the number of search results for Paul Ryan. Both Virginia and New Hampshire were in the top ten states searching out and talking about Paul Ryan on Facebook.

I’ll also note that Ryan has more Twitter followers than Joe Biden, too. Ryan has 192,383 followers to Biden’s 106,541 followers.