Obama v. Romney in the social media ring: not even close (infographic)

Republicans better get down on their knees and pray that Americans never vote via Facebook or Twitter.

If the presidential election that’s due to take place on November 6 was settled on social media, Obama would win in a cakewalk. Especially seeing that the two most common words in presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s posts are “Barack” and “Obama.”

Above: A word cloud showing Romney’s most-used words in tweets.

Image Credit: Socialbakers

It’s a little unfair, perhaps, to compare a sitting president who tweets almost 15 times a day with a challenger who only officially accepted his party’s nomination for candidacy in August of this year. But the campaign has been ongoing for many months now.

Socialbakers, the social media marketing company, compared Obama and Romney’s social results from May 1 to September 19.

And Romney actually does get better engagement on Facebook than Obama, with a 2.58 percent engagement rating on photos, compared to just .55 percent for Obama, and out-engaging Obama by about a seven-to-one margin on uploaded videos.

But the raw numbers show Obama’s massive lead.

On Twitter, the president has almost 20 million followers, and Facebook is even better with 28.7 million fans. Those numbers compare to just 1.1 million who follow Romney on Twitter and 7.1 million Facebook fans for the Republican challenger.

Romney is showing faster growth on a percentage basis than Obama — 58% to 26% on Twitter, and 76% to 9% on Facebook — probably due to both a smaller base number and the fact that only this year has election talk kicked into high gear, pushing Romney more into the spotlight.

Here’s the full Socialbakers infographic:

photo credit: Profound Whatever via photopin cc