Updated: Just after midday on Wednesday, the DNC matched the total volume of tweets as the entire RNC event, Twitter says.
Earlier: Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the DNC is out to a much stronger start than the RNC on social media. Twitter said that Michelle Obama’s speech peaked at more tweets per minute (28,003) than Mitt Romney’s speech (14,239) by a big margin. The mayor of San Antonio, Julian Castro, drove more Twitter conversation than any GOP speaker except for Mitt Romney.
Twitter tallied the early numbers, and the first night of the DNC convention soared past 3 million mentions compared to the GOP’s final night which closed with approximately 4 million. According to Bluefin Labs (infographic below), Tuesday night accounted for 1.3M social mentions compared to 503K for the first night of the GOP convention. More women participated in the DNC conversations (56%) compared to the RNC (45%).
Michelle’s biggest fans were watching from home: twitter.com/BarackObama/st…
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 5, 2012
Why the gap? For starters, the Obamas have a much larger social following than the Romneys, from the candidates (Barack 19.4M vs. Mitt 1M) to their wives (Michelle 1.4M vs. Ann 99K). Both the President and the First Lady took to Twitter on Tuesday night (well, their staff did) to leverage their social advantage — retweeting each other to reinforce Michelle Obama’s speech.
And generally speaking, it’s safe to say the Obama’s average voter is more likely to be active on Twitter than Romney’s average voter. A new study by Pew Internet discovered that Democrats who use social networks are much more likely than Republicans or independents to say social media is important in the political process, from keeping informed to recruiting others.
Here’s the Bluefin infographic on the night:
