Social Media and the Republican Primaries: To know you is not to love you

I was intrigued by the recent Ad Age article which looked at the correlation between social media and primary results and concluded that social media was not predictive (yet). So I decided to do some research on my own.

First things first, I was struck by the huge difference in social media between President Obama and the current four Republican candidates.

Mitt Romney tops the Facebook “likes” scale at 909,600. President Obama has 25 million.

Newt Gingrich tops the Twitter followers scale at 1,500,000. President Obama has 13,000,000

So, right off the bat, if social media is a good sign of election results, these guys are fried.

The four candidates, together, have 2,885,000 “likes” to President Obama’s 25,600,000 and 2,449,000 Twitter followers to President Obama’s 13,000.

However, the four candidates, together, have put out 7,340 Tweets to the President’s 3,130. So, could there be a mathematical correlation there?

I looked at the number of states currently having held primaries but excluded four huge economies: American Samoa, US Virgin Islands, Guam and the Northern Marianas Island. With those important economies out of the way, Romney has 15 victories (58% of the total), Santorum has 9 (or 35%) and the rest have 2 (or almost 8%)

So, Facebook v Wins... nothing there:

There’s just no rhyme or reason between the percentage of wins for each candidate and their Facebook “likes”. Ron Paul has almost 1 million “likes” and 0 wins; Santorum has almost no “likes” (179,800) but is the second largest winner.

So I looked at Twitter

Gingrich –a well know firebrand—has the most Twitter followers at 1.5 million while winners Romney and Santorum have only 377,800 and 166,500 followers respectively. So, excluding Ron Paul, there seems to be a perverse reverse correlation.

And when we look at the number of tweets, the relationship becomes a bit clearer:

When looking a the number of Tweets, we find the same perverse relationship: excluding Ron Paul, the more candidates “twitted” the less states they won.

So, evidently, the more they Tweet and the more we know about these candidates... the less likely we are to vote for them.

As a reminder... the four Republican candidates together have issued 7,342 Tweets... President Obama has only issued 3,130, well under 50%.

So, can social media predict an election? Perhaps, in a perverse kind of way... it might.