This Is What It Looks Like (on Facebook) When You Lose a Presidential Election

Losing a Presidential election must be hard. Mitt Romney has a wonderful family, he’s healthy (per Presidential physical), and he can continue on with his life knowing that nearly half of the co...
This Is What It Looks Like (on Facebook) When You Lose a Presidential Election
Written by Josh Wolford
  • Losing a Presidential election must be hard. Mitt Romney has a wonderful family, he’s healthy (per Presidential physical), and he can continue on with his life knowing that nearly half of the country wanted him to be President – he’ll be ok. But still, it has to be tough – I can only imagine.

    Of course, the amount of people talking about Mitt Romney will drop off with every passing day. People will continue to talk about President Obama, and will soon begin to talk about the possible GOP candidates for 2016. But Mitt Romney is going to lose popularity, it’s inevitable.

    The Washington Post ran an article that said Mitt Romney was losing Facebook followers by the minute. It makes sense that a losing Presidential candidate would suffer some sort of momentum loss in the social media department. But they’re reporting a loss of nearly 600 friends an hour. I thought I’d look at some data from Facebook and Twitter – and they’re right. Mitt Romney’s social media momentum hit a wall after election day.

    Behold, this is what happens to you on Facebook when you lose a Presidential election (courtesy PageData):

    For weeks, Romney was consistently gaining between 120,000 and 160,000 new Facebook likes per day. Suddenly, yesterday, Mitt Romney’s page hit a brick wall. Then he started losing likes. Followers are jumping ship. Over 32,000 unliked him on Thursday, and over 13,000 have unliked him today.

    Plus, there’s that giant plunge in “people talking about this.”

    When I first looked at Mitt Romney’s Facebook page today, I saw that he had 12,078,406 likes. Just 15 minutes later, his total likes dropped to 12,078,211. That’s a plunge of nearly 200 likes in 15 minutes. Whoa.

    Over on Twitter, it looks similar – although not quite as tragic. Every day from October 1st to election day, Romney gained followers. On the low end, 6,000 a day. On the high end, 30, 40, 50 thousand. Yesterday he gained 1,156 and today he’s gained 55.

    Just for a comparison, President Obama has gained over 1.1 million Facebook likes since November 7th. He’s also gained nearly that amount of Twitter followers. To the victor go the social media spoils, I guess.

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