Who do people care more about – Kanye or Trump?
We should never underestimate the power of social media during election campaigns, writes Lucy Anna Gray
In the latest spin of celebrity roulette that is US politics, Kanye West has announced he is running for president. The former Donald Trump supporter has decided to “take the red hat off” and break out on his own.
No pollsters or analysts seem particularly fazed by this new contender – after all, West did warn us he’d run someday. He won’t win the election (perhaps I should have added a qualifier like “probably” or “is unlikely to” there, but I’m going to nail my colours to the mast and say his Birthday Party bid won’t get him into the White House), but the question about whether he’ll gain enough traction to take any significant votes from
Biden or Trump is still interesting. There is also a bigger question about whether the musician can actually even run, given he has missed several important filings.
The question I am most curious to know the answer to is: who do people care more about? As an audience specialist who monitors what people click on, what they search for and what they talk about online, as soon as West announced his apparent presidential bid I began looking into which celebrity heavyweight was generating more interest: him, or Donald Trump.
Looking at search trends, there is a clear winner. Despite a big spike when West announced his bid for president, based on what people are searching on Google, Trump is far ahead.
Trump dominates even more if we look at social media following. Whereas the president has millions of followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, West is only regularly active on Twitter, having a tumultuous relationship with Instagram and no official Facebook account. He trails the president with 29.6 million followers to Trump’s Twitter army of 83 million.
Just because he isn’t present on all the platforms does not mean people aren’t constantly talking about Kanye West. Over the last seven days, approximately 10,000 articles including the term “Kanye West” were engaged with on social media (Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest), according to Newswhip data, with just under 11 million interactions in total. Far more were published with “Donald Trump” at just under 43,000; however, total interactions were only 29 million. This shows Kanye West getting approximately 63 per cent more interaction per post than Donald Trump, which is fascinating.
This granular analysis shows that people are engaging a lot more with content about West, rather than merely reading a story and then clicking away. It is too early to tell whether he has any hope of maintaining that momentum, but as we learnt in 2016, we should never underestimate the power of social media in elections.
Yours,
Lucy Anna Gray
US audience editor