The Presidential Race and Social Media Infographic

The U.S. presidential election is heating up, and President Barack Obama is winning by a landslide — on Facebook.

According to a study from social media analytics provider SocialBakers, the Commander in Chief had a dominating lead in May over Republican contender Mitt Romney, in terms of social media fan engagement.

In the left corner of the ring, Obama threw a straight punch with nearly five times as many people "talking about" him as Romney. The president also gained four and a half times as many new fans as his challenger.

Meanwhile, Obama's viral reach — a metric equal to the total number of "likes" and comments, multiplied by the average number of friends (140) per user — exceeds his opponent's by almost 25 percent, SocialBakers said.

Obama is a friend of social media, for sure. In the past year, he joined Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram, participated in a live Google+ hangout session, and tweeted a link to his campaign's Spotify playlist.

"The Obama vs. Romney data raises strong questions about whether Obama's superior social presence could be an indication of how Americans will vote this fall," SocialBakers said in a statement.

Romney held a steady Facebook lead among Republicans during the primaries, but a look at today's social media landscape leaves the former Massachusetts governor in the dust. "With this new head-to-head comparison of the final two," SocialBakers CEO Jan Rezab said in a statement, "it's quite clear that Obama blows Romney out of the water."

As of today, Obama's Facebook campaign page showed upwards of 27 million likes, quite a few more than Romney's 1.8 million.

SocialBakers studied more than just numbers, looking at trends in the type of content that spurs fans' actions. Facebook users were more engaged, the company said, when candidates highlighted successes, accomplishments, or even revealed a glimpse of their private lives, instead of sticking to drab campaign rhetoric.

"It will be interesting to see how that correlates to the election results in November," Rezab said.

In the last presidential election President Obama utilized social media better than any president before him, of course social media hasn’t been for that many elections. This year it seems like Obama is not going to be the only one using social media. Although according to today’s infographic Obama is still dominating most social media perhaps this is because of his demographic? I’m sure having a younger more liberal demographic helps in the social media race. In the GOP Mitt Romney and Ron Paul seem to have dominated the other opponents, again Ron Paul has that younger demographic helping him out. By no means will social media determine who our next president is but it is nice to see that our candidates are moving with the times.

Everyone no matter your party should go out and vote. There is a difference between liking something on Facebook and actually going to the polls. [via]