Hillary Clinton has been surging ahead of Donald Trump in the polls of battleground states,??? ?? ???? and yet the level of conversation on Facebook about the two candidates has remained fairly close.
Facebook and Mashablelooked at the volume of conversation state by state between July 10 and Aug. 9 and found that while Trump is behind the Democratic presidential nominee in polls, the real estate mogul is capturing more people's attentions on the world's largest social network.
SEE ALSO: Facebook election data shows third-party candidates are gaining steamThe average user isn't just liking or commenting on the occasional post. In battleground states, a Facebook user (in the U.S. and 18 or older) that interacts with Trump-related content did so an average of 13 times. For users that interact with Clinton-related content, the number drops to 11.
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The data does not indicate the sentiment used when discussing the candidates.
In total, almost half of Facebook's more than 200 million U.S. users have interacted with or discussed content relating to one of the candidates.
In Florida, 3.3 million people generated 49.1 million interactions — likes, comments, posts and shares — related to Trump. About 2.7 million people generated 34.7 million interactions related to Clinton.
Clinton is ahead of Trump 46.2 percent to 41 percent in Florida based on an average of the ABC News/Washington Post, CBS News/New York Times, CNN, Fox News and NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable The differences are smaller in the 10 other swing states — Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — but not by much when the numbers are adjusted based on percentage of population.
For Florida, about 20 percent of the population 18 or older (if we estimate that everyone in the state is on Facebook) is discussing Trump while 17 percent is talking about Clinton.
Each of the level of conversations differ by 2 to 4 percentage points. Nevada has the biggest gap with an estimated 20 percent of the voting age population talking Trump compared to 16 percent for Clinton. Nevada is one of the tightest races for the election, according to the latest poll.
Iowa, another close race according to polls, also has one of the smallest differences in level of conversation on Facebook. In the swing state, 467,000 people are generating 5.5 million interactions related to Trump compared to 403,000 people garnering 4.0 million interactions about Clinton.
The graph below tracks interactions per state adjusted for differences in population.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable While conversation on Facebook may not swing the election, more people than ever before are turning to the social network for political discussions. More than 100 million people in the U.S. have discussed the presidential election on Facebook, which is nearly half of the 205 million U.S. Facebook users.
And that level of conversation is good for Facebook. “It is a political time and we’re proud of the role we play in elections, not just here but around the world,” Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said in an onstage discussion with American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks in June.
“The vision of Facebook was to enable individuals to connect, but to connect not just to their friends and family, but also to the people who are representing them and who they want to represent them," she said.
For those who don't want to see let alone participate in the political discussion, there's a new Google Chrome extension you can try.