With the USA preparing to go to the polls to find a new President, we conducted a quick Twitter analysis of the two main presidential candidates using our new Twitter Connector.
Followers, tweets and following
Looking at the big numbers, Donald Trump triumphs in terms of the total number of followers and tweets. However, Hillary Clinton is following far more people. Perhaps this means she’s more receptive to other people’s views than The Donald?
Frequency of tweets over time
While Trump has made more than four times the number of tweets compared to Clinton, Hillary has been tweeting at a much higher rate over the last three months.
It also appears that Hillary has a tweeting schedule, with most of her tweets coming on Mondays and Tuesdays until mid-July. She also doesn’t mind sharing the good days, tweeting more than 100 times when Obama endorsed her on July 27th.
You can’t trump self-promotion
And what do you do when you don’t get big endorsements like Hillary? Well, you can take a leaf out of Donald’s book – just endorse yourself! In the past few months, Trump mentioned himself in his tweets more than three times as often as Hillary.
Engagement, one-liners and beat-downs
While Donald’s engagement level is consistently high (perhaps due to the consistently controversial nature of his tweets), Hillary sent the Twitterverse into melt down with a simple one-liner aimed at Trump: “Delete your account.”
Delete your account. https://t.co/Oa92sncRQY
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 9, 2016
And Trump’s retort wasn’t not too bad either:
How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up–and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted? https://t.co/gECLNtQizQ
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2016
We can also see how that infamous jibe compares to her other top ranked tweets:
Which types of tweets elicit the most engagement?
Last week, in our blog Data visualization uncovers that short and sweet makes a good Tweet, we discovered that @KatyPerry has found a successful engagement recipe using short and sweet tweets. However, at face value, the same style of tweets don’t seem to apply to politics. In fact, looking at the last three months, Donald has clearly maintained a high level of user engagement by using longer tweets.
Tweeting @ the competition
In a direct battle of tweets, Hillary has been aggressively tweeting @ Donald Trump, mentioning him very frequently over the last three months (note: The report automatically updates to reflect mentions over the last three months, meaning that the figures will change over time).
Twitter loves it when these two adversaries go toe-to-toe and directly tweet one another, as shown by the ‘favourites’ and ‘retweets’ figures below. Hillary also has a knack of using political slogans in her tweets.
Who’s winning the battle for the Twittersphere?
Hillary has been aggressive in her heightened use of Twitter over the past few months, as demonstrated by the analytics based analysis above. So what has inspired this spate of activity?
Is Clinton motivated by Barack Obama’s endorsement? Is she purposefully trying to increase engagement levels with selected demographics by using carefully curated tweets? Or is she simply trying to catch up with Donald Trump in terms of social media engagement?
Regardless, all in all, Hillary’s overall engagement levels are significantly less than Trump’s. So the question is: Is it too late for Hillary to truly harness Twitter as a potential election winning vehicle?
Exploring Yellowfin’s Twitter Connector
Yellowfin’s Twitter Connector enables you to instantly connect to, visualize and act on data from your Twitter account via pre-built best practice reports and dashboards.