Buzz is one way that political campaigns measure their marketing success, and Facebook has teamed up with CNN to reveal how much buzz the two major parties are getting as the U.S. presidential race heats up.
This morning they’ve launched a site called Facebook & CNN Election Insights. It offers a snapshot of how much discussion is happening on Facebook about the Obama and Romney campaigns — and, more specifically, about each of the four presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
As of this morning, Facebook discussion of Republican Mitt Romney was up 14 percent over the past three days, while conversation over the other three candidates was down in the double digits.
The Facebook-CNN tracker doesn’t measure the sentiment involved in those conversations, just how much discussion is taking place. Twitter recently launched its own Twitter Political Index, a tool that does rate the candidates based on the sentiment of Twitter activity. (And no doubt that both major parties have sophisticated social media tracking tools that can analyze sentiment on Facebook.)
Unlike Twitter’s site, Facebook-CNN Insights offers demographic and geographic breakdowns — you can see how much conversation is happening in a certain state, by male or female and by age group.
If you watch CNN’s political coverage in the coming weeks/months, you’ll see them referring to this Facebook data at times. That may end up being the best buzz of all.
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