If you believe Facebook, then President Barack Obama is crushing Republican challenge Mitt Romney. Obama has 28.5 million Facebook fans, while Romney only has 6.6 million and apparently analysts are interested about how the whole election is playing out on Facebook.
Apparently while Obama has more than four times as many fans, Romney’s are five times more engaged than Obama’s. This engagement metric, People Talking About This, is a measure of how many people are commenting, liking, or sharing content.
Obama today has 3.1 million “people talking about this,” and Romney has 3.3 million. More than half of people like Romney’ posts while Obama’s is only 11 per cent.
There could be a number of reasons for this. Romney’s posts are more simple and forceful and less of a rehash of what’s on his website. The other are the sorts of people who are “liking” his posts. They are active quilters, gun enthusiasts, and churchgoers. Basically people who like his message of government controls on women's wombs, giving rapists visiting rights, turning the US into Saudi Arabia and giving all the lower and middle class money to the rich.
Obama fans are often video gamers, meditators, and jigsaw puzzle fans. They must like his message of “it is all the republican's fault that I have not cured cancer” and er... that's it. Obama fans like Samsung Mobiles, while Romney fans like Fox News and Wal-Mart. One of the big problems with using Facebook as a gauge of who is really interested in voting for whom is that Facebook remains inaccessible to those without opposable thumbs and this makes a big chunk of the US voting public.