Obama vs. Romney 2012 Social Media Barometer Dashboard (for week ending 9/30/2012)

The latest update of the Obama/Romney Social Media Dashboard is ready for viewing.  Highlights through September 30, include the following observations:

• Obama has regained a slight lead in share of voice (last week the share of voice was virtually even).  This week Obama social mentions represented about 58% of all mentions between the two candidates.
• Obama's positive sentiment fell to 40% of negative (down from last week where positives were 53% of negatives) and Romney's positive sentiment improved slightly to 50% (last week positives were 48% of negatives.
• At the end of the reporting period, traffic spiked to Romney's website, and the reason is not immediately apparent, but the increased traffic improved both Romney's Site Rank, and his Reach.  Consequently, the increase in traffic to the Romney website has impacted engagement metrics both average pageviews and average time on site were lower this week by about 25%.
• Romney continues to have higher engagement among Facebook fans, although engagement as of week ending September 30, was at 22% down from nearly 30% last week.  Romney continues to build his fan base on Facebook steadily adding 6.5% new fans in the past week.  His fan base is still less than one third of Obama's (29.0 million for Obama vs 7.7 million for Romney) but if Romney keeps this pace he should exceed 8 million fans by next week.
• The two candidates make vastly different use of Twitter.  In the past week, Obama issued 162 tweets versus Romney's 13.  This level of communication is fairly constant in comparison to the prior week.  Retweets (last five tweets retweeted) as a percent of followers however has fallen a bit for Romney.  This week's retweet rate is only 57% of last weeks number.  Romney still has much higher engagement in Twitter than Obama, which is a consequence of the smaller, more engaged fan base.

Next week should be very exciting with the first Presidential debate of the election season occurring on Wednesday.  Check back next Monday to see how the debates shaped the social media narrative.

If you need assistance in developing or executing social media dashboards for your brand, contact the Marketing Data Scientists at Drake Direct   ( www.drakedirect.com).

Rhonda and Perry Drake