And then there were three! In the weeks since we went into a pandemic-induced slumber, the list has narrowed to Trump, Biden and Bernie. We’ll go back to Friday/weekend Top Ten posting as of this week.
Check out last week’s top 10 over-performing Facebook posts from the current Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns, using data from our friends at CrowdTangle. Remember, these are posts that have seen significantly more engagement than the norm for their pages. By these metrics, pages are competing against themselves, not each other.
A special note to our readers-via-email: be sure to click through to the online version of this article to see the embedded posts. It’s well worth your time.
1. Donald J. Trump (14.1x)
2. Joe Biden (7.5x)
3. Bernie Sanders (7.1x)
Note: You’ll see Trump’s words used against him a lot this week. With video to make it stick.
4. Donald J. Trump (6.7x)
Note: I love that the video preview thumbnail shows a ship with guns (an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer) and not a peaceful hospital ship. Lack of attention to detail, or do they just like to look tough?
5. Bernie Sanders (6.3x)
Note: Bernie’s the only one going with policy substance this week.
6. Joe Biden (6.0x)
7. Bernie Sanders (5.5x)
8. Bernie Sanders (5.5x)
9. Joe Biden (5.1x)
10. Joe Biden (4.4x)
Explanation of the Scoring
These posts don’t represent the most-viewed pieces of content on Facebook (since that would almost entirely end up being dominated by the same small handful of large-audience Pages over and over). Instead, we list the posts that performed the best (using shares as the primary metric) against the organization Page’s OWN average (hence the word “over-performing”). To build the list, we CrowdTangle’s tracking system, which generates an average rate of growth for Pages over time (with at least 50 data points before a Page is scored). So, the "x" numbers listed above specifically represent how many more multiples of shares each post received compared with what the Page’s posts normally get. Note that we set a minimum bar of total engagement of around 500 shares or so.
About CrowdTangle
CrowdTangle is a new tool that helps organizations easily keep track of what’s being shared on Facebook. Organizations can use it to find shareable content around their own issue area or to keep track of what affiliated Pages are posting on a regular basis. Launched in late January, the beta version of the tool is already being used by dozens of leading organizations across the country. If you want to see how it works, watch this short video: http://www.screenr.com/Iv1H
– cpd
Photo by Daniel Schwen, via Wikimedia Commons