Mitt, Paul winning Facebook primary

POLITICO has joined forces with Facebook to offer readers an exclusive look at the conversation taking place on the social networking site about the Republican presidential candidates ahead of South Carolina’s crucial primary on Jan. 21.


If Mitt Romney was worried about a late surge from Rick Santorum toppling him in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, his fans on Facebook knew better.

According to an exclusive survey of all U.S. Facebook users provided to POLITICO by Facebook, the volume of posts, status updates, links shared to friends’ walls and user comments about Romney in the days leading up to the Granite State primary predicted a strong finish.

On Jan. 10, primary day, Romney reached over 100,000 mentions on the social network, about the same number as Ron Paul, who finished second in New Hampshire.

Although Paul finished 17 points behind Romney in New Hampshire, his prowess on social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, where he has legions of devoted fans eager to spread his message, is well-known.

Though Santorum shot to within eight voters of Romney in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, he actually saw a significant drop-off in Facebook interest immediately afterward. Santorum reached a high of over 100,000 Facebook mentions, to match Paul, around the 3rd but saw a steady slide in Facebook chatter leading up to New Hampshire.

By the time of the primary, far less people were sharing information about him with their Faceboook fans. Santorum ended up placing fifth at the Granite State polls.

This is the first time that Facebook, a powerful social-networking utility with 800 million global users, has surveyed its U.S. users around a presidential contest in this way. It not only examined the volume of posting, sharing and linking about candidates from Dec. 12 through Jan. 10, it also studied the “sentiment” around such data, or whether the comments being made about a candidate were positive or negative in tone.

Facebook does not publicly disclose its number of U.S. users but does say that more people in the U.S. use Facebook than voted in the last U.S. presidential election. To gather the data, Facebook uses an automated process to analyze all posts and comments from U.S. users that mention presidential candidates.

To determine whether Facebook users had nice or nasty things to say about the GOP contenders, Facebook employed a tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which it says is a “well-validated software tool used frequently in social psychological research to identify positive and negative emotion in text.” Facebook employees did not read any user content or posts in doing the survey.

Facebook, for instance, used the software to search for words like “love,” “nice” and “sweet” on the positive side about candidates. And on the negative side, it looked for terms like “hurt,” “ugly” and “nasty.” As with any automated system, however, there are quirks, and sometimes positive and negative sentiments were found in the same post about the same candidate. That comment would get counted more than once.

But some things stand out from the monthlong data. For example, Newt Gingrich by far received the most consistently negative comments on Facebook for the month examined.

The reasons for the trend aren’t exactly clear, but the data began trickling in shortly after Gingrich surged to the top of the GOP field for a brief period in early December. The moment Gingrich became a real contender to win Iowa, a super PAC financed by Romney supporters began bashing him with a barrage of negative advertisements in the Hawkeye State, the ramifications of which could have worked their way through cyberspace (though Facebook surveyed national users, far beyond the scope of the advertising buy).

The national news media also began paying more attention to the former House speaker and the negative ad barrage around the same time. Right around the caucuses, over 50 percent of the Facebook activity around Gingrich was negative. Or maybe Facebook users simply were down on Gingrich at that point in time for other reasons.

Negative sentiment for all candidates, including Gingrich, dropped markedly on Jan. 3, the day of the caucuses — suggesting the nation’s first contest might have given all Facebook users a warm feeling about the candidates for just 24 hours.

Declaring a winner of the Facebook primary — or the candidate viewed most positively over the past month — is far more difficult than tallying votes. Santorum didn’t see a spike in positive postings on Facebook around his Iowa win, but Gingrich did.

Jon Huntsman seems to have been a Facebook favorite, but won less than 1 percent of the vote in Iowa. Romney did well with users around the time of Iowa, and Paul, with his zealous fan base, held pretty much steady.

Facebook uses an automated process to identify and analyze all Facebook posts and comments that are made by U.S. users and mention any of the presidential candidates. The analysis of sentiment is done using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count [http://www.liwc.net/], a well-validated software tool used frequently in social psychological research to identify positive and negative emotion in text. No employees at Facebook or POLITICO read the posts and all measures are aggregated by candidate and by day. Facebook provided POLITICO with total post volumes and average sentiment levels for each candidate from Dec. 12 through Jan. 10.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of the graphics had the incorrect date for the Iowa caucuses.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Dianna Heitz @ 01/12/2012 05:04 PM CORRECTION: An earlier version of the graphics had the incorrect date for the Iowa caucuses.