Trump twitter followers as of 20200921
2020 Election

Election 2020: Trump Leads Biden almost 10 to 1 in Social Media Followers

Fatih Siyasi 1690 Views ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  , 

Tweeter-in-Chief

During election season we hear a lot of talk about polling data as a way to gauge who may be the victor come November. As of the date of publishing this article, incumbent President Donald Trump is trailing his Democrat challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, in the major polls. But Trump appears to be closing the gap.

Aside from the fact that the margin between the two major party candidates historically tends to narrow as we get closer to election day, as well as the fact that Trump was trailing Hillary Clinton in the polls in 2016 as well, there is a metric that seems to be largely ignored by the mainstream talking heads this year. That metric is the number of social media followers each of the candidates has.

As of this writing and with less than 45 days to election day, President Trump has 86.1 million Twitter followers. Joe Biden has 9.5 million Twitter followers. That means Trump has over nine times the number of Twitter followers that Joe Biden has. If you add the official @POTUS account, 31.3 million followers, and Biden’s former VP account, @VP44 at 2.5 million followers, to the equation, then Trump’s total Twitter follower ratio increases slightly to almost ten times that of Joe Biden (117.4 million versus 12 million followers).

Trump twitter followers as of 20200921
Trump twitter followers as of 20200921

The Social Media Following Metric

Marketing and public relations professionals know that building a social media following is not something you can achieve by simply cutting a fat check and saturating the market with ads like in a traditional twentieth-century style national marketing campaign. A social media following develops organically, like word-of-mouth. People don’t tell their friends about the great new pizza place in their town unless that pizza place actually has great pizza and people don’t follow you on social media unless they like your “brand”.

Biden Twitter followers as of 20200921
Biden Twitter followers as of 20200921

Social media followers are golden because they choose to subscribe to your brand and they are people who you have a direct line to, free from anyone else’s filter. For a politician it means you get to bypass the news pundits and deliver messaging direct to your base, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Social media can also be a double-edged sword, of course, as it opens the door to foot-in-mouth disease that could otherwise be filtered by a national politician’s public relations personnel. Follower numbers can also be inflated through the creation of fake accounts, but it would take a lot of work to fake tens of millions of social media accounts with the current technology. Furthermore, a large base of artificial followers would become obvious due to the organic nature of social media.

So what this all means is, with less than six weeks to go, Donald Trump has a direct line to almost ten times the number of people Joe Biden has, bypassing the news media and the talking heads. And Trump’s followers know they’re getting the real, unedited tweets straight from the President himself. His Twitter connection to his followers is genuine, not some public relations operation that runs on focus group data.

On the other hand, the likelihood that any of Biden’s Twitter followers actually believe he is doing any of his own tweeting is pretty low, despite their willingness to support a man that is obviously in cognitive decline. While Trump’s willingness to let it all hang out on Twitter can be a curse at times, his gaffes only add to his appeal as the outsider fighting for regular people against career politicians that have a habit of talking out of the side of their mouths.

Facebook, Instagram and YouTube?

Trump maintains a dominant lead when we consider other leading social media platforms, as well. On Facebook, President Trump has over 31 million followers and Joe Biden has 2.9 million followers, so about the same ratio as Twitter. On Instagram, Trump has 21.9 million followers to Biden’s 4 million, which is far less of a gap but still over 5:1. On YouTube, neither candidate really has an impressive following in light of their resources, but Trump still leads Biden about 10:1 at 1.07 million subscribers for Trump to Biden’s paltry 189,000.

Will This Matter On Election Day?

It remains to be seen whether Trump’s social media dominance over Biden will be enough to overcome the COVID-19 fear-mongering by the WHO and the mainstream media, an economy with tens of millions of people out of work (caused by the draconian COVID-19 lockdowns), and the last-minute wild card presented by the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

But the direct line that social media gives a public figure can be a powerful, always-on rallying tool. In the hands of a charismatic figure like Trump, who is clearly adept at using social media, dominance in this realm may well prove a determining factor in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

If you were running for president, would you rather be the candidate with tens of millions of social media followers you can rally all day long by typing a few words here and there into the smartphone in your pocket at no cost, or would you rather be the candidate with a ten-point lead in the national polls that can barely formulate a coherent sentence, much less send out spontaneous, crowd-rallying tweets?


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Fatih Siyasi

Engaged in counter-propaganda related work.

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