Trump gets the most Facebook interactions
As the 2016 GOP Convention begins, an increasingly digitized nation turns to their respective social media platforms such as Facebook to discuss presidential hopefuls and political issues concerning the nation.
Facebook's data aggregation has always served as a statistical benchmark, helping to measure and make sense out of the viral conversations among 160 million-plus, predominately millennial, users in the U.S. The mammoth social media site's most recent data, conducted from June 16 to July 16, surveys what primary political issues concern its users.
The numbers from Facebook, in order from top to bottom, suggest the top five political issues among its users are: crime and criminal justice, government ethics, homeland security and terrorism, and finally guns and religion.
Numbers from the same report that revealed Facebook users' top political issues also unveiled data on users' engagements with this year's presidential candidates.
Data for each candidate from both the convention state of Ohio and the nation as a whole was divided and measured by two categories: "unique number of people...engaging in conversation about each of the candidates" and "interactions those people generated."
Facebook described the "interactions" as "the total aggregate number of likes, posts, comments and shares made about a particular candidate within the timeframe."
In the Buckeye State, 1,046,000 unique users shared, liked, posted or commented on something associated to presumptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump nearly 8,328,000 times.
Presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, scored second in Facebook engagement among Ohioans with 957,000 users interacting in some form or fashion with Clinton associated content about 7,983,000 times.
Libertarian Gary Johnson had just 59,000 Ohio users engaging with content relating to his third-party campaign 309,000 times, while Green Party nominee Jill Stein garnered 32,000 users engaging a total of 162,000 times.
Nationwide, Trump still received more attention on Facebook compared to Clinton. Trump tallied 2,731,000 more unique Facebook users than Clinton.
Overall, Trump racked up a total of 27,346,000 unique users engaging with campaign associated content approximately 221,906,000 times. Clinton reached 24,615,000 unique users throughout the U.S. a total of 215,429,000 times.
Third-party candidates' results were insignificant compared to Trump and Clinton. But on a national scale, Johnson racked up 472,000 more unique Facebook users than Stein.
Johnson totaled 1,519,000 unique Facebook users either sharing, liking, posting or commenting about him 7,935,000 times, and Stein rounded out 1,047,000 users interacting with her campaign 5,283,000 times.
According to Politico, in addition to Facebook's regular political analysis, the social site will attempt to enhance their role within the news world this summer by partnering up with 21 media organizations and advertising at both the GOP and Democratic Conventions.
Starting Monday, Facebook attempts to boost their news production by unveiling the "Facebook Lounge" at Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena. The lounge will serve as a broadcast base for the streaming service Facebook Live, which has partnered with C-SPAN for convention coverage.