Paul Ryan: Most Talked About Pol on Facebook

-By Warner Todd Huston

CNN reported this week that Rep. Paul Ryan has become the king of Facebook by knocking President Obama off “the most talked about” list of US politicians.

CNN recently entered into a partnership with Facebook to track things political on the social sharing network and according to the new “Facebook-CNN Election Talk Meter,” in the 54 hours after presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney introduced Rep. Paul Ryan as his choice for the vice presidency, Paul Ryan became the star of social media.

Facebook-CNN talk meter scores

  1. Rep. Paul Ryan 5.21
  2. President Barack Obama 4.84
  3. Vice President Joe Biden 4.01
  4. Gov. Mitt Romney 3.74

In fact, Ryan became such a hot topic on social media that he almost matched Olympic swimming star Michael Phelps on the Talk Meter and that is pretty impressive considering how badly politics typically shows up on Internet “top” lists compared to pop culture and sports. As CNN measured it, in the days after he won all his most recent Olympic medals Phelps rated a 6.51 to Ryan’s 5.21 on the 1-10 scale.

Let’s face it, politics usually rates pretty low on Internet “top” lists. Whenever you go to the Yahoo top ten, or the Google top lists, rarely do politicians or political issues show up in the search results. Most of the time you get pop icons like the Kardashians, singers like Miley Cyrus, and the like on such lists, but politicians rarely show unless they are being arrested for something or caught up in a sex scandal. Yet Ryan got big traffic in social media according to CNN.

The “Talk Meter” measures the “buzz” as well as “likes” on Facebook. This was the cabler’s first report on the results of its collaboration with the social media giant.

As to Facebook Fan Pages,stats show that Paul Ryan is more popular than Vice President Joe Biden, as well. What is interesting about that is that Ryan’s gotten more Facebook fans on his fan page than Biden even though Ryan’s page is not yet a month old and Biden’s has been around for years.

Joe Biden

  • 355,000 fans currently
  • Since August 1: Added 4,200 fans (+1.2%)
  • Since Saturday: Added 728 fans (+0.2%)

Paul Ryan

  • 501,000 fans currently
  • Since August: Fan page didn’t exist
  • On Saturday: Added 222,100 fans
  • Since Saturday: Added 237,900 fans (+107.1%)

CNN-Facebook also noted that two swing states also rated high in the number of search results for Paul Ryan. Both Virginia and New Hampshire were in the top ten states searching out and talking about Paul Ryan on Facebook.

I’ll also note that Ryan has more Twitter followers than Joe Biden, too. Ryan has 192,383 followers to Biden’s 106,541 followers.

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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.


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