2:45 PM
Mike Brownstein
In this coming Presidential Election season, I expect that we will be hearing a lot of stories about the social media aspect of the campaigns. This starts with a story today that a former Newt Gingrich staffer mentioned to Gawker that 80% of the Twitter followers Newt Gingrich had were fake. This accusation is coming a day after Gingrich was complaining about the fact that the press has not mentioned his Twitter following. Gingrich stated:
"And it says, 'now it's true that Gingrich has 1.3 million followers and (Michele) Bachmann only has 59,000, but she's getting more new people every week.' It turned out I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn't count because if it counted I'd still be a candidate; since I can't be a candidate that can't count. So we've been a little bit like a sailing ship in the middle of a hurricane in which we are sailing straight into the teeth of the media, and that slowed us down.
So let's think about this for a moment. If you have over 1 million Twitter followers, you're doing something right. Let's not forget that Newt is not even polling near 10% in almost any poll, and only raised $4 million last quarter. He's not the most popular or wealthiest candidate which would make this story a little odd to me. So to test this proposition that Newt Gingrich is an amazing Twitter user, let's see how many people are following Gingrich and other famous and not-so-famous people. If you equate Twitter following with high popularity, you'd assume that a high following to list ratio might be able to solve the problem. People generally use lists on Twitter to follow groups of people, rather than following or to aggregate their larger Twitter feed. The data is very crude and only accurate as of August 2, 2011. It was taken from each person's Twitter page and then searching their Twitter names on Klout. So here's my data*:
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As you can see Newt Gingrich has the highest ratio of followers to lists of anyone on this list. That's surprising considering we have Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and Ashton Kutcher on this list. This would imply that Newt Gingrich is more popular than the most popular people on Twitter. Even if Klout scores are not entirely accurate, it seems like this issue has been taken into account in the metric. I should also mention that none of the names that are running for the Presidency in this dataset are over 1 million followers, except for Newt Gingrich. This is surprising considering the front runner is not even close on Twitter. This does not mean that Gingrich is more popular, but that he is as Redditors call it: "a karma whore." He is someone who looks more popular than he really is, which can be confirmed by the Klout scores (take as you will).
So is Newt Gingrich a big deal on Twitter? Sort of, but he's not the most popular candidate, because Michelle Bachmann does have a higher Klout Score. Also, just because you have 1 million followers, doesn't mean that there's an engaged audience. Advertisers, bots, or people who just don't use Twitter that are following you, may likely not be engaged in discussion on the Internet. So in reality, Newt Gingrich is using dirty tricks comparable to the same ones he blames the Congressional Budget Office for fudging budget numbers.
*-If you'd like to use this data, that's fine, all I ask is that you cite/link it to this post.
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