This article was published on August 4, 2015

Donald Trump vs. Hilary Clinton: Digging up the their Twitter secrets


Donald Trump vs. Hilary Clinton: Digging up the their Twitter secrets

Donald Trump, the man, the legend… the hairpiece. Last time I wrote about the Donald, it was to flag up a 3D-printed butt plug designed to protest his comments conflating Mexicans and rapists. It’s fair to say a lot of Trumpers and Trumpettes weren’t happy.

Get your own Donald Trump wig on Amazon or keep your self-respect
Get your own Donald Trump wig on Amazon or keep your self-respect

So this time, I’m referring purely to the data. Trump is doing well in a lot of Republican primary polling. If he wins the nomination, it’s likely that his rival for the presidency will be Hillary Clinton. How do they stack up?

Let’s start with Trump. Here’s what his Twitter engagement looked like from June 1 to August 3:

The journey of a potential President Twitter troll
The journey of a potential President Twitter troll

From June 1 to June 14 – the day before he announced his candidacy – he received an average of 2,644 tweets per day. From announcement day to August 3 that jumped to 72,084 mentions per day.

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Notable jumps in the number of tweets bombarding him? Following his comments about escaped convict El Chapo on July 13, the slur against John McCain on July 18 and the Lindsey Graham phone number stunt on July 21.

The numbers

In terms of raw data, ‘the Donald’ has 3.4 million Twitter followers. Here are his seven biggest:

Justin Bieber

Jimmy Fallon

Pitbull

Ryan Seacrest

Paris Hilton

Shaq

Other interesting followers:

Vince McMahon

Magic Johnson

Vincent Kompany

Jack Welch

Republican primary rivals who follow him:

Ted Cruz

Chris Christie

Rand Paul

Mark Everson

George E. Pataki

A prominent Republican who doesn’t follow him

Mitt Romney

The breakdown of his followers

Trump followers’ biggest interests are: Business, (American) football, television and music. 30 percent of his followers are based in NYC, with a strong base in the midwest (24 percent are from there).

He has nine times the number of active followers than the average top global brand (1.8 million versus 200,000). He has 18,000 followers with more than 10,000 followers, giving him the potential for an even bigger megaphone.

Interestingly, only 4,326 of his followers actively describe themselves as “Republican” in their Twitter bio, but 23,796 use the term “Conservative.” There are 1,479 self-declared Democrats following him and 2,756 Liberals.

Hillary Clinton: The numbers

Hillary Clinton has 3.97 million followers, so she’s ahead of Trump on a pure numbers basis.

Here are Hillary’s biggest followers:

Katy Perry

Ellen DeGeneres

JLo

Pink

Bill Gates

Pitbull

Amitabh Bachchan

Rivals who follow her

No GOP candidates follow Clinton.

Nicki knows…
Nicki knows…

Bernie Sanders

Lincoln Chafee

Clinton has 13 times the amount of active followers than the average top global brand (2.65 million versus 200,000). Only 1,447 of her followers have the word “Republican” in their Twitter bio, 3,121 identify as “Conservative”, 7, 984 call themselves “Democrat”, while 11,022 use “Liberal.”

The Donald versus Hillary

Here’s how the two compare in terms of mutual and individual prominent Tweeter support.

Team Donald

Pattie Mallette (Justin Bieber’s mom)

Dwayne Wade

Rory Mcilroy

JWOWW

Troy Aikman

 Rupert Murdoch

David Copperfield

Kevin Jonas

Dennis Rodman

FOX News

Hope Solo

Ivanka Trump (obviously!)

Team Hillary

Bill Clinton (also, obviously!)

Victoria Beckham

Ciara

Ben Affleck

Ricky Martin

JK Rowling

Seth MacFarlane

Lindsay Lohan

https://twitter.com/lindsaylohan/status/627298273213181953

… and Anna Kendrick, Jared Leto, Jillian Michaels, Ellie Goulding, Will.i.am, Sharon Osbourne, Mark Hamill, Pharrell, Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Alba…well, you get the idea.

If it were an election decided by celebrities, then Hillary would walk it. But it’s not. Essentially, all we learn from the social media showdown between Clinton and Trump at this point is that stars are as clueless as anyone else.

That and Trump knows how to game social media and the traditional media with the kind of stunts that trundle on for days. The Donald knows what gets the people tweeting.

This post was created in collaboration with SocialRank using its new Market Intelligence tool which has opened up today. The default account you can mess with is that of VC and leader of the Twitter eggs Marc Andreessen. 

Read next: Twitter, a Google company – How and why that would work 

Featured image credit: Based on an image by Andrew Cline / Shutterstock.com

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