Mitt Romney may have won last week’s political horse race, but there’s one area of this campaign where — by comparison to his competitor Barack Obama — he’s seriously lagging: Social media.
Al DiGuido, writing at Human Events, has this insight of wisdom on how wide the gap is between Romney and Obama on this front:
As of Wednesday, Mitt Romney has amassed a total of 1,791,263 Facebook Likes and 521,344 Twitter Followers. The president’s team has done a masterful job of leveraging interactive and social media ; creating an army of over 26,769,218 Facebook Likes and over 16 million Twitter followers.
In simple math, Barack Obama has 15 times the number of Facebook Likes and over 30 times the number of Twitter followers than Romney. While there are some who continue to dispel this data and who harbor a belief that Facebook and Twitter communities are a non-issue — i.e. ”they don’t vote” — nothing could be further from the truth.
DiGuido uses these numbers to offer a challenge to Romney’s former rivals (and I broadly paraphrase): help a brother out.
His point is — while perhaps overstated — a solid one. While the primary may have in some ways helped Romney, lacking serious primary challengers — those pesky Appalachian states excluded — Obama had time to focus on infrastructure. What is more, he had the muscle of the entire Democratic machine at his disposal.
The social media side of that may be chock-full of young people who will forget to (or be too lazy to) vote in November, but those are still people checking their Twitter and Facebook feeds on a near constant basis. When it comes to alerting activists to what they need to know, no tool should be ignored.
Let’s not get beyond ourselves, however. Even if every major GOP player were to throw their Facebook likes and Twitter followers into Mitt Romney’s pot, Obama would still dwarf such a ragtag ensemble.
Still, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, et al., ought to do as DiGuido suggests — and support the GOP’s nominee in more ways than tepid endorsements.