An enterprising politico has leveraged Facebook’s new “people talking about” metric for every Republican presidential candidate.
Patrick Ruffini, a political strategist at Engage, has made public a Google spreadsheet that will constantly update the rankings of the most talked about GOP candidates for president on Facebook, using the new tool launched last week.
With the new “people talking about” metric, Facebook will quantify how many people are talking about a topic or page across the entire social networking site, regardless of whether a page is liked or not.
The recently added share button will also help to improve the dialogue around hot or emerging topics on Facebook.
Ruffini’s initiative, announced the day after a GOP Bloomberg TV-Washington Post debate, shows Herman Cain with a huge lead over the rest of the field in Facebook buzz with nearly 80,000 people talking about him daily.
Mitt Romney, who got a boost earlier this week following an endorsement by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, is now in second place with 36,000 users talking about him.
While Ruffini’s statistics, and our own Election Tracker, show Facebook buzz slowly building for the GOP candidates, none of them can lay a glove on the man they are trying to beat, President Barack Obama.
The President has a total of 443,882 Facebook users talking about him currently, combined with a total of 199,034 for the Republican field.
Have you noticed Facebook’s people “talking about” feature?
Source: All Facebook
Thursday, October 13, 2011