With the exception of Jeb Bush, none of the Republican Presidential candidates have a LinkedIn page to promote their candidacy for the office of President of the United States. Of the top 15 candidates on the Republican side surveyed, most have dedicated Twitter handles and Facebook pages in support of their presidential campaigns. Several have a variety of other social media properties like Google+, Youtube channels and Instagram accounts but none leverage LinkedIn – except Jeb Bush. Even Governor Bush’s LinkedIn page only has 4,030 followers.
The two main candidates on the Democratic side (Clinton & Sanders) have Twitter and Facebook pages dedicated to their campaigns. Senator Sanders also has a Tumblr account. While Senator Clinton does not have an official campaign page on LinkedIn, she does have her personal profile page that sports over 90,000 followers. Most of the candidates do have their own personal profiles on LinkedIn so it seems odd that they do not have campaign pages.
Interesting in all of this is the focus on Facebook and Twitter. While political campaigns can be viewed through the lens of a B2C marketing campaign, I am shocked that only Jeb Bush has opted to set up a LinkedIn page for his campaign. In spite of doing this, his campaign is obviously not focused on promoting followers on this particular property.
In the Twitter world, Trump is king of the mountain here. His Twitter account is growing rapidly. It is up to nearly 3.5MM followers; up 300,000 in one week. He is averaging 10x the following on Twitter when compared with his closest Republican rivals. He trails Hillary Clinton however who is approaching the 4MM mark on Twitter.
When it comes to Facebook, Rand Paul is by far the leader here with 2MM likes. Huckabee in second place with 1.8MM. Ted Cruz and Rick Perry are also above 1MM likes.
Overall, on the democratic and the republican side of the aisle, all the leading candidates appear to have basic social media proficiency.
I would however point out that none of the campaigns have leveraged any of their followers as “advocates” to also publish their content in any proactive way. There are many tools – like NewzSocial – that provide political campaigns the opportunity to get supporters to volunteer social media advocacy in a coordinated manner.
Looks like the majority of the campaigns are still using social media tactics from the 2008 campaign and not leveraging platforms like LinkedIn or tools like NewzSocial.
Stay tuned for my next post where I try to get the campaigns to answer why they don’t use LinkedIn company pages to promote their presidential campaigns.
| Republican Candidate | LinkedIn Page | Followers | Facebook Page | Likes | National Polling | |
| Jeb Bush | Yes | 4,030 | Yes | 228,000 | 240,000 | 12.8% |
| Donald Trump | X | Yes | 48,000 | 3,430,000 | 23.2% | |
| Ben Carson | X | Yes | 138,000 | 395,000 | 6.6% | |
| Rick Santorum | X | Yes | 263,000 | 237,000 | 1.4% | |
| Chris Christie | X | Yes | 114,000 | 36,200 | 3.4% | |
| Ted Cruz | X | Yes | 1,300,000 | 445,000 | 6.2% | |
| Carly Fiorina | X | Yes | 137,000 | 385,000 | 1.0% | |
| Lindsey Graham | X | Yes | 126,000 | 23,200 | 0.4% | |
| Mike Huckabee | X | Yes | 1,800,000 | 379,000 | 6.6% | |
| John Kasick | X | Yes | 1,141 | 81,100 | 2.8% | |
| Bobby Jindal | X | Yes | 269,000 | 204,000 | 1.2% | |
| Rand Paul | X | Yes | 2,000,000 | 653,000 | 4.8% | |
| Rick Perry | X | Yes | 1,200,000 | 306,000 | 2.0% | |
| Marco Rubio | X | Yes | 922,466 | 773,000 | 5.2% | |
| Scott Walker | X | Yes | 342,000 | 169,000 | 10.6% | |
| Democratic Candidates | ||||||
| Hillary Clinton | X | 90,045 | Yes | 1,100,000 | 3,970,000 | 60% |
| Bernie Sanders | X | Yes | 930,000 | 208,000 | 23% |
Jeff Leroux is Vice President Sales & Services at NewzSocial
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lerouxj
