2008 Presidential Candidates Battle for Online Dominance
October 17th, 2008 Posted in Buzz, Rebecca Roebuck, Social Media 
I have seen a lot of posts recently about which candidate has more of an online presence. As Webbed Marketing's Social Media Darling, I am very interested in this comparison. We track online presence for all our clients so I decided to put Barack Obama and John McCain through my own test, WM style.
First I ran the two candidate's websites through our Webbed-o-Meter.
Obama's website scored a 97.8 out of 100 points. McCain's website scored a 74.4 out of 100 points. Obama's
website definitely seems to be generating more buzz, being passed around more by
consumers and fans and is being seen more on social networks.
Let's see if I am right…
To see why Obama's website scored higher on the Webbed-o-Meter than McCain's website, I looked at which popular social networks the candidates were active on.
Barack Obama is a member of:
- Facebook – 2,167,874 supporters
- FriendFeed
- Twitter – 100,787
followers - MySpace – 726,110 friends
- YouTube – 102389 subscribers
- Flickr – 7,160 contacts
- LinkedIn – over 500 connections
- Digg
John McCain is a member of:
Obama has over 2 million supporters on Facebook, four times McCain's supporters. Obama's MySpace page is modern and follows the typical MySpace layout, showing friends, comments, interests, etc. McCain's MySpace page has been reformated to look like a one page site with a video, an ad you can grab and links to view friends, send a message, make a comment or view the blog. Obama also has over 30 times the number of followers that McCain has on Twitter. McCain's YouTube page has a similar lackluster to his MySpace page – a few videos and favorites, but no friends, comments or bulletins box. Obama also has a presence on FriendFeed, Flickr, LinkedIn, Digg, to name just a few, where McCain's presence is lacking. This helps explain Obama's higher Webbed-o-Meter score. He is on more social
networks, generating more content and connections.
I recently came aross a tool called Twinfluence that shows the Twitter members with the most influence/reach based on friends, followers, frequency of tweets. Twinfluence ranks Barack Obama as the most influencial tweeter, with a reach of over 8 million.
When comparing the sites on Compete,
the candidates start out about equal in September of 2007 but you can see by January of 2008 Obama has taken a lead with more unique visitors than McCain. For the year (Sept 2007 – Sept 2008) Obama has had 5,538,460 unique visitors to his website while McCain has had 3,117,691 unique visitors.
It looks like BarackObama.com has won out over JohnMcCain.com for now. It will be interesting to see how this social media comparison affects the election results.
I will continue to follow these numbers over the next few weeks to see how things fluctuate leading up to the election. Does online dominance equal electoral domination? Or does the internet not reflect true life? What are your predictions?!
Tags: barack obama, election, facebook, john mccain, myspace, online presence, social media, twitter, webbedometer
One Response to “2008 Presidential Candidates Battle for Online Dominance”
By Lara Kretler on Oct 20, 2008
Rebecca, this is a really interesting comparison! Hopefully all of the people out there in social media land will not just interact with and talk about the candidates online, but will also get out there and vote. I think that if that happens, on November 4 we may really see a demonstration of the power of social media.