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Bernie Sanders gained the most followers of any 2016 candidate on Instagram. | AP Photo Sanders bests Clinton on social media

Bernie Sanders may be trailing Hillary Clinton in delegates, but going into the Democrats’ debate on Sunday, he’s showing momentum on social media.

On Instagram, Sanders saw the greatest overall gain in followers, adding a whopping 85,580 new followers, according to the photo sharing app. He also overcame Clinton to become the most followed Democratic candidate, and second overall to Donald Trump’s 1.11 million followers. Sanders now has 927,240 followers compared to Clinton’s 896,980.

Sanders also had the most liked post of the week compared to all presidential candidates with more than 102,000 likes.

Though Sanders had the highest increase in the number of Instagram followers, Marco Rubio had the highest percentage increase in followers with a 13.15 percent gain.

But it was Sanders again on Facebook who rivaled Trump when it comes to top posts (he had two of the top 10 posts this week by interactions, and Trump had the other eight), according to social media tracking firm Socialbakers. His most popular post of the week was a direct attack on Trump for his failure to immediately disavow an endorsement from white supremacist David Duke.

America's first black president cannot and will not be succeeded by a hatemonger who refuses to condemn the KKK. Posted by Bernie Sanders on Sunday, February 28, 2016

And according to social media tracking firm ListenFirst, the post was the second-highest engaged post of the week with more than 188,000 likes, shares and comments, and helped Sanders see the highest lift in Facebook engagements across all candidates.

Despite having the most engaged-with posts, Clinton still dominated the conversation on Facebook for the week with 9.3 million people making 3.7 million interactions about the former secretary of state, compared with 5.8 million people making 2.3 million interactions about Sanders.

And despite it being a Republican primary debate on Thursday, Clinton had the most retweeted tweet of the night.

Of course, the social media king Donald Trump dominated absolutely all the other candidates on social media this week, sucking up about 60 percent of the conversation on Twitter and Facebook among all the candidates — some of his highest shares of the entire campaign. On Friday, Trump had a full 70 percent of the Facebook conversation. His most popular post this week on both Facebook and Twitter was from Wednesday, when he challenged the Republican establishment.

Why can't the leaders of the Republican Party see that I am bringing in new voters by the millions-we are creating a larger, stronger party! Posted by Donald J. Trump on Wednesday, March 2, 2016



