24/7 Wall St.

Another presidential debate is on deck. With election season set to take off into full overdrive in the weeks and months ahead, 24/7 Wall St. wanted to take a statistical view of each candidate from the Republican field, and then match them up against the two leading Democrat candidates, and measure them up on traditional social media and website measurement metrics.

This put the following candidates in place: Jeb Bush, Dr. Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Donald J. Trump and Scott Walker for Republicans, and it shows Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for Democrats. If other Democrat candidates gain steam, or if Joe Biden throws his hat into the ring, they will of course be tracked in the future.

In order to measure social media, we used only Facebook and Twitter because they are the most widely used. Facebook was tracked by the number of “likes” and Twitter was tracked by a number of “followers.” 24/7 Wall St. wants to warn readers that the figures used were a snapshot taken between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, September 16, 2015. Those numbers and rankings will of course change through time. They may even be different by the time that the debate starts and are certain to change drastically over the coming days.

For website tracking metrics, Alexa.com was used for a website place ranking. Rather than a global ranking, these were ranked by what place their website came in against all websites in the United States. After all, these metrics were just not relevant on a global basis as only Americans get to vote for this election.

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While there are many other social media destinations to track, and while there are many other site measurement tools exist, these are the majors. YouTube is not universally used on an official channel basis by candidates, and many outside results clouded the search results. Instagram also did not have enough comparable results. Quantcast is a site we wanted to use for “monthly unique users,” but the problem is that most were estimated because the sites were considered “not Quantified” by Quantcast.
What stood out was that Facebook likes were dominated by Donald Trump, then by Ben Carson and Rand Paul. The Twitter followers were more than just dominated by Donald Trump, at more than 4.1 million. Next in line was Marco Rubio at 841,000, and then Rand Paul at 681,000. Hillary Clinton led Bernie Sanders massively on Twitter with 4.23 million followers, but Sanders had two different accounts.

In actual website analytics via Alexa page ranking, it seemed odd on the surface that Bernie Sanders was ranked much better than Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Ben Carson. There may be many explanations for this, but we are not pondering the matter at this point.

One issue that needs to be considered here is that not all measurements are created equally. These likely cannot be tallied up for any formal voting projections. Some social media users prefer one service over another, as do candidates.

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Lastly, visual data have been shown as the raw numbers on a table. Names are in alphabetical order. It also shows the Facebook name and likes, the Twitter account name and followers, and then the official website of each candidate with an Alexa ranking.

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