According to our Facebook tracking tool, President Obama has a whopping 11.3 million supporters on the giant social networking site. (Technically, Facebook used to count those people as “fans” but now they are just listed as “likes.”) The national politician with the number closest to his, as we’ve reported many times, is former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, with just under 2 million. Seems like quite a comfortable lead, no? The rest of the Republican 2012 field lags way behind: Mitt Romney has about 465,000, Mike Huckabee about 366,000, Ron Paul about 238,000, Newt Gingrich with 69,000 and Tim Pawlenty has just 53,000.
But if you play around with Facebook’s internal demographic tools a different picture of political loyalties emerges. Fanning or “liking” a politician on their official page is just one way to show support, one that is very useful to the politician in that they can easily reach out to supporters via that connection. People also put a lot of information about their interests on their own profile pages, which anyone can filter through if they want to place targeted ads aiming at specific interest groups.
Just go to create an ad on Facebook. As the site steps you through a simple process enabling you to target your ad to specific demographic or interest groups, it tells you the “estimated reach” of the ad depending on the choices you make. And by this measure, Barack Obama is still the most-liked politician in America, but the gap is a lot smaller.
Facebook’s “estimated reach” among the overall U.S. population:
Barack Obama: 2,567,920
Sarah Palin: 1,493,060
Mitt Romney: 317,840
Mike Huckabee: 245,440
Ron Paul: 211,860
Newt Gingrich: 46,880
Tim Pawlenty: 36,860
Those numbers go up slightly if you include related interests, such as “Barack Obama 2012” or “Students for Barack Obama,” but I think as a basic comparison a simple search on their names is acceptable. Even more intriguing, among Americans over 30, Palin has 851,260 on Facebook visibly interested in her, while Obama has 756,860.
What exactly should we make of this? I asked a couple of online advertising experts for their take. Eric Frenchman, who handled online ad targeting for the McCain campaign as part of his work for Connell Donatelli, said:
“I’m not sure. I think for the newer folks they are more likely to have more people on their fan list versus people putting in their interest. I fan a lot of politicians but not sure any of them are in my interest (I might have put in one to experiment). So politicians pre-fanning they probably have more interests.
In other words, the longer a politician has been on Facebook, the more likely they will accumulate people listing them as an “interest,” as opposed to more recent arrivals, like Palin, tallying up the fans, since that is a newer Facebook feature. But Frenchman’s comment hints at something else–if listing a politician on your Facebook profile page as someone you are interested in is a relatively rarer activity, then a candidate’s “interest” number could well be a more valuable indication of organic interest. If you keep in mind that campaigns and politicians are spending a lot of money and building their web presences generally to funnel people to their Facebook pages–which after all they alone have the ability to then use to communicate back with their fans–then the “interest” total could well be seen as the more “real” core of support.
Josh Koster of Chong + Koster, a Democratic firm, had the opposite take about the relative closeness of “interest” levels in Obama and Palin. Koster sees that as an advantage for Obama. “Targetable fans = dilute-able fans,” he argues, meaning that these folks are probably seeing lots of distracting political ads on their Facebook pages simply because they are accessible. Whereas Obama’s much larger fan base on his official page is less touchable by others.
“Obama has a Facebook presence that only he can access,” he says, while “Palin has a FB presence that anyone with a credit card can access.”
A third online advertising expert who I emailed tended to agree that an expression of interest in a politician was a stronger signal of organic support than fanning or liking them on their official page. He adds, “While Obama is likely far more popular at large, Palin has likely been far more active on the medium, or at least more provocative. So [the difference] may be more a function of the platform than a reflection of larger sentiment. There are probably also more proxies for supporting Obama – progressive, Democrat, etc. in political beliefs – than for Palin, hence her name used directly [scores higher] whereas people can express their support for Obama in other ways.”
Indeed, if you look for people who listed the “Democratic Party,” “Democrats” or “Democratic” as one of their interests, you’ll find 3,843,760 while “Republican Party,” “Republican,” GOP” and “Republican Conservative” just produces an estimated reach of 2,215,300. (MoveOn.org has about 69,000, a fraction of its 5 million members.)
It’s tempting to dismiss all of these online statements of support as nothing more than digital bumper-stickers, but as Joe Trippi once told me, when a voter self-identifies with a candidate on an online social network, the connection is worth a lot more than a real bumper-sticker, since the medium is two-way and people are in effect inviting campaigns to reach out to them. (Furthermore, he noted that getting 50,000 people to put a real bumper-sticker on their car would make any national campaign quite happy.)
The difference between Obama’s “like” numbers and “interest” numbers could be because his base has been on Facebook longer, and people just don’t update their profile interests as often as they “like” something new, whereas Palin’s supporters could be more recent adopters of Facebook and thus more likely to list her as an interest when creating their profile. It’s also certainly in part due to the fact that Obama attracts interest and support from around the world, and many of his Facebook fans are from overseas. (A quick look at his “interest” base in Europe shows well more than a half million people there, according to Facebook’s “estimated reach.”)
Or there’s really a difference in levels of enthusiasm, and pound-for-pound, Palin is packing more intensity in her base than Obama is in his. She certainly is freer to play in the Facebook sandbox as a celebrity with no official duties, while Obama is now the man in the Rose Garden. But the fact is, both Obama and Palin currently have online support bases that dwarf every other national politician currently toying with a run for the White House in 2012. That, more than any variation in how you measure the actual numbers, is the bottom line.
[Bonus link: My friend and colleague Ari Melber’s take on Palin’s “Paper Grizzlies” (h/t Alex Howard)