Republican Candidates for the US House Are Up to 9 Times More Successful on Social Media
Even with their party’s presidential candidate catching up in September’s polls, Democratic candidates for the US House of Representatives are profoundly behind their Republican counterparts when it comes to utilizing social media for campaign goals.
The Huge Gap in Social Media Success
The marketing engineering firm Online Impact Group LLC has recently completed an analysis of 12,704 social media posts from September 1-14, 2024, across 1244 Facebook and Instagram profiles of US House candidates. The results of the analysis show an exceptionally large gap in social media success factors, with Democratic candidates’ posts receiving much less enthusiasm and interest from their followers compared to what Republican candidates’ posts receive.
The charts below give a starting frame of reference, showing how the Republican candidates’ posts are receiving many more enthusiastic reactions in terms of likes and shares from followers than the Democratic candidates’ posts. The sheer volume of likes of Republican Instagram posts gives substantially more visibility to what Republican House candidates have to say, and the large margin that Republicans have over Democrats in number likes and shares counts on Facebook is extremely beneficial to the spreading of their messages as well.
Further into this article are additional insights regarding the disparities visible in this chart. In these additional insights we show how the Instagram numbers are actually worse than what can be gleaned from the chart below.
Why These Numbers Matter: Effects on the November 2024 Election
Prior studies including ones from Pew Research Center and The Brookings Institution, alongside interviews with Meta Employees indicate that social media has highly impactful effects on elections. Social media efforts done poorly in an election context can lead to:
- Fewer chances to attract and connect with younger voters
- Reduced opportunity to counter false and misleading statements
- Diminished opportunities to encourage voter turnout
At the time of this writing, the November 2024 election outcome is predicted to be highly sensitive to voter engagement factors such as those mentioned above, especially voter turnout. In fact, voter turnout has been discussed by Meta employee Antonio Garcia Martinez as being a crucial election outcome factor that can be manipulated through targeted social media use.
If get-out-the-vote initiatives on social media are in the plans, then at the moment, Republican House candidates may find success over their Democratic opponents simply by being more social media savvy and paying attention to what works for businesses who depend on social media for gaining both new customers as well as customer loyalty.
More insight on the numbers
Some will notice that the total number of likes and shares on a social media platform such as in the charts above are heavily dependent on the number of posts and number of followers that the profiles had during the period analyzed. To get a much better idea of the Democrat/Republican performance difference, we calculated the number of likes and shares as a portion of total likes/total shares that would result if every follower clicked like or clicked share on every post.
As can be seen in the charts below, this vantage point shows a slightly-less-poor performance on Facebook likes and shares on the part of Democrats. On Instagram however, a much greater disparity is seen – almost an order of magnitude. Our takeaway is that Democratic candidates’ ability to encourage enthusiasm on Instagram pales in comparison to Republicans, with enthusiasm being gauged by the amount of likes and shares posts receive.
Comments on Posts; Paid Advertising
As can be seen across many posts by politicians, the attitudes conveyed in comments on both Democratic and Republican candidates’ posts range from extremely negative to extremely positive, with long threads of arguments filling up the comments. As a result, comments on posts were excluded in this analysis, with only likes and shares being considered as indicative of abilities by each party to generate enthusiastic reactions in the form of likes and shares from followers.
In addition to excluding comments, this analysis does not take into account the presence of any paid content such as sponsored posts or any other advertising options available on the social media platforms. However, if the reactions from paid content for a given candidate gets fully measured, it provides excellent background information that can be used to make non-paid posts more appealing. We suspect that this type of cross-pollination between paid and non-paid content may not be happening within most of the Democratic circles, simply due to the glaring discrepancy between Democratic and Republican post success.
Possible Reasons Why Republicans Are So Far Ahead in Social Media Performance
Social media algorithms – the ones inside Facebook and Instagram– constantly analyze the behavior of the followers who view the posts. The algorithms are programmed to show new posts to a small set of followers to see how much they like, comment, and/or share, to decide if the post is worthy of showing to more followers.
Shares are one of the most important behaviors that social media platforms want to see. When shares happen on a post, the algorithms know it’s a good post to give even more visibility to besides those who received the share, because it makes the platform gain further usage and engagement, which any platform thrives on because of how it increases ad revenue.
To generate more likes and shares, adherence to the latest ‘rules of the game’ such as what types of posts receive the most attention in the form of likes, shares, and comments. One might think that for Republicans to be so much farther ahead in gaining likes and shares, there would be visible some noticeable difference in types of posts being published by each party’s House candidates.
However, the differences in post types, as shown in the below charts for Facebook and Instagram post types by party, do not show differences anywhere near those seen in likes and shares.
The primary difference shown in the charts above is the more frequent use of image posts on Instagram by Republican House candidates. But comparing this difference of 20% against the tremendous disparities among the parties in likes and shares indicates that having more image posts is likely not the game changing factor.
Our Takeaway
Through process of elimination, we believe that the content of the Democratic House candidates’ posts may be significantly less attention-getting and/or emotion-triggering than the content of the Republican House candidate’s posts.
As mentioned in the studies of social media’s impact on elections, the Democrats’ problem with publishing interesting posts is very likely keeping their followers’ interest and enthusiasm from rising to the level of Republicans’ followers, risking results such as lower voter turnout.
With such a large difference in play affecting such crucial aspects to this election as voter turnout, it isn’t hard to imagine the November 2024 election outcome being in Republicans’ favor.
From a marketing engineering perspective, a much-simplified summary of our findings can be conveyed by drawing a business parallel: If a business in a competitive market had such low social media success relative to their competitors as Democratic House candidates do, that business would be eclipsed by the competition in its attempts to promote and sell its offerings using social media.
For more information on the analysis performed, or to learn about other marketing measurements, contact Online Impact Group via email at contact@onlineimpactgroup.com.
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