Obama v. Romney on Facebook

Since Herman Cain dropped out of the presidential race, Mitt Romney has added 500,000 Facebook fans. This brings him to a total of 1,644,358 page likes, most from his 2008 presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has 26,138,136 page likes.

What does this mean for the campaigns?

The key value of Facebook to a campaign is to get your supporters to share your posts with their friends, followed by using pages to directly messaging your supporters. The third party messenger activity provides campaigns with ongoing personal endorsements from its fans to its fans’ friends. This dramatically increases the impact of campaign messages.

In the past week, Mitt Romney’s fans have shared (liked, shared or commented on) his Facebook posts 169,541 times. Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s fan have shared his Facebook posts 379,866.

So while Romney is getting a higher rate of sharing from his fans than the president, Obama’s fans have shared his posts 2.24 times more often in absolute numbers. Add this to the fact that Obama’s messages are directly delivered to more than 24,000,000 fans than Romney’s, and it is clear to see that Obama is dominating Facebook so far in this campaign.