While it may not be the same thing as beating Hillary Clinton with any particular demographic that uses Facebook, both Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush do appear to have a leg up in using the platform… at least for now.
“Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic Party front-runner for the 2016 presidential nomination, doesn’t have her own Facebook page,” according to CNN.
According to CNN, a search for Hillary Clinton yields only a “topics” page, while both Jeb and Mitt have their own landing pages. As it stands, if “likes” translated into votes, Mitt Romney would beat Hillary hands down in any run for the White House.
Yes, Hillary Clinton has a page for book [sic] “Hard Choices.” But that presumes all her Facebook activity is limited to the goal of selling books, which we can all bet isn’t quite true.
“I am obviously thinking about it,” Clinton said of running for president in April at a marketing summit in San Francisco.
Compared to the pool of possible 2016 contenders, Hillary Clinton’s book page (at the time of this writing) has 46,469 “likes.” Mitt Romney, on the other hand, amassed a significant fan base on Facebook during the 2012 election cycle, reaching more than 11 million “likes.”
Given Romney’s run in 2012, it may not be such a surprise that he outpaces Hillary in this sense. But that doesn’t account for Jeb Bush’s advantage over her as well.
Jeb Bush, who doesn’t have nearly the following of Romney but still higher than Clinton’s book page, falls at 150,876 “likes.” He, like Romney, is using both Instagram and Facebook to communicate his position on tax reform, State of the Union and promoting his Rise to Right PAC with a short native video.
But how do Clinton, Romney and Bush stack up against each other in overall engagement on Facebook?
According to data provided by Facebook, a snapshot of activity on Dec. 24, 2014, shows 11,377 people were talking about Hillary Clinton, with a total of 15,339 interactions: likes, comments and shares. Flash-forward to this week, Jan. 21, 2015, and 874,812 were talking about her, with a new total of 1, 472,100 interactions — an increase of more a million [sic] engaged users.
CNN opts to end its item with a question for Hillary… or perhaps it’s actually a nudge in Internet parlance.
With a total 1.85 billion total Facebook users in the United States, it’s no question Facebook will play a key role in engaging users in 2016. But it also begs the question, if Clinton is serious about running, why hasn’t she developed her own Facebook fan page?
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