So, this is surprising.
Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic Party front-runner for the 2016 presidential nomination, doesn’t have her own Facebook page.
Currently, when you search Hillary Clinton on Facebook, you get a “topics” page:
This is a far cry from the official public figure pages that both Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush are operating:
Yes, Hillary Clinton has a page for book “Hard Choices.” But that presumes all her Facebook activity is limited to the goal of selling books, which we can all bet isn’t quite true.
“I am obviously thinking about it,” Clinton said of running for president in April at a marketing summit in San Francisco.
Compared to the pool of possible 2016 contenders, Hillary Clinton’s book page (at the time of this writing) has 46,469 “likes.” Mitt Romney, on the other hand, amassed a significant fan base on Facebook during the 2012 election cycle, reaching more than 11 million “likes.”
Recently, Romney’s activity on the page has spiked with speculation that me might take a third run for president in 2016. Since September, he’s posted everything from the ice bucket challenge with his former vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan, to behind-the-scenes Thanksgiving photos and family grandbaby announcements. He was also quick to provide his own State of the Union reaction and post about March for Life — signaling his return to the political conversation.
Jeb Bush, who doesn’t have nearly the following of Romney but still higher than Clinton’s book page, falls at 150,876 “likes.” He, like Romney, is using both Instagram and Facebook to communicate his position on tax reform, State of the Union and promoting his Rise to Right PAC with a short native video.
But how do Clinton, Romney and Bush stack up against each other in overall engagement on Facebook?
According to data provided by Facebook, a snapshot of activity on Dec. 24, 2014, shows 11,377 people were talking about Hillary Clinton, with a total of 15,339 interactions: likes, comments and shares. Flash-forward to this week, Jan. 21, 2015, and 874,812 were talking about her, with a new total of 1, 472,100 interactions — an increase of more a million engaged users.
Since declaring his interest to run in 2016, the conversation around Mitt Romney has skyrocketed, exceeding the engagement and interest in Clinton. A snapshot from Dec. 24, 2014, shows that only 1,658 people were talking about Romney on the platform. A later snapshot from Jan. 21, 2015, shows that more than a million people, 1,100,060, were talking about Romney. In just under a month, that’s an increase of 1,098,402 people talking about him. As for his engagement, the number of people posting, sharing and liking content related to Romney has also increased significantly, by a whooping 1,816,611 in that same time period.
Bush has also experience an increase in Facebook chatter and interaction, but nothing compared to the numbers of Clinton and Romney. On Dec. 24, 2014, Bush experienced 8,493 interactions. By Jan. 21, 2015, his interactions had increased to 312,267 — a jump of 312,774.
With a total 1.85 billion total Facebook users in the United States, it’s no question Facebook will play a key role in engaging users in 2016. But it also begs the question, if Clinton is serious about running, why hasn’t she developed her own Facebook fan page?