Friday news dumps have not been kind to presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
The headlines about the FBI investigation of Clinton’s emails and Trump’s comments about women spread like wildfire on social media as political commentators from both sides of the aisle weighed in.
Social media analytics company Spredfast said that while both scandals proliferated on Twitter, there were marked differences in the trends.
“In the case of Clinton, we saw a huge spike when the news first broke this afternoon, but buzz has since been declining,” said Chris Kerns, vice president of research and insights at Spredfast. “Conversely, with the Trump tapes, the news built throughout the day and didn’t peak until almost nine hours later with 5.7K tweets per minute.”
FBI Director James Comey announced earlier on Friday that the bureau is looking into recently uncovered emails related to its investigation of Clinton. Spredfast said that the social conversation hit its peak around 1:20 p.m., ET, with about 5,700 tweets pouring in a minute.
But Oct. 7 headlines about a 2005 Access Hollywood recording in which Trump said he could “do anything” to women because he was famous clocked a higher total number of tweets within the first six hours.
Trump’s headlines generated about 161,000 tweets within that time frame, while the FBI’s new emails during the comparable period generated about 136,000 tweets, according to Spredfast.
About 1.1 million tweets were sent in the 24 hours after the Trump tape leaked. It remains to be seen whether emails related to be Clinton will be able to generate the same amount of conversation.
Methodology: For data related to the FBI investigating more emails related to Clinton, Spredfast included tweets that included the terms: “Hillary” or “Clinton” and “FBI” and “email.” The analytics firm used tweets that included “Trump” and “tape” or “recording” for data related to the 2005 recording.
source”cnbc”
