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Fortune: How Obama Is Owning Trump on Twitter
http://fortune.com/2017/08/17/barack-obama-donald-trump-twitter/Barack Obama and Donald Trump both notably relied on the social media platform to build their presidential campaigns and build direct, personal rapport with their supporters. And yet, there is one glaring difference between their profile pages: Obama has around three times as many followers as Trump.
Make no mistake, both have a disproportionate amount of power on social media. Klout, a firm that measures social media influence, puts them at around the same score—98 for Obama and 95 for Trump, on a scale of 100. Even casual observers know that both can elicit worldwide reactions from their tweets, which is most lamentable with Trump’s proclivity for tweets on North Korea and nuclear war—and yet, Obama boasts 93.6 million followers on Twitter and has six of the 10 most-liked tweets of all time, while Trump has a comparatively paltry 36.1 million followers.
-snip-
A Harvard scholar of political science, Joseph Nye, coined the term “soft power” in the 1980s. Nye has written that “Soft power is the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use … economic and military might to make others follow your will.”
Unlike real-world politics, there is no hard power in the online sphere. Soft power—essentially a synonym for coolness, received admiration, or genuine respect here—is the currency of social media. Obama exuded a presidential equanimity and global consciousness that drove worldwide perception of the United States up 15% during his eight years as president, according to Pew Research. That positive view of the States immediately suffered a precipitous drop when Trump took office in January. Where 64% of global citizens favored Obama, only 22% of them have a positive view of Trump.
These numbers, coupled with the fact that Trump’s first day in office inspired the single largest protest in U.S. history, underlie one simple conclusion: People simply don’t like Trump. They don’t like him in real life, and they don’t like him online. In the real world, they may laugh at his antics, they may watch his borderline syntax-less speeches, they may even obligingly vote for him as the least worst of two options, but they still don’t like him. Conveniently for the electioneering Trump, this fact can be hidden in real life, but online—where popularity among human users is truly democratic and organic—the numbers tell the whole story.
Make no mistake, both have a disproportionate amount of power on social media. Klout, a firm that measures social media influence, puts them at around the same score—98 for Obama and 95 for Trump, on a scale of 100. Even casual observers know that both can elicit worldwide reactions from their tweets, which is most lamentable with Trump’s proclivity for tweets on North Korea and nuclear war—and yet, Obama boasts 93.6 million followers on Twitter and has six of the 10 most-liked tweets of all time, while Trump has a comparatively paltry 36.1 million followers.
-snip-
A Harvard scholar of political science, Joseph Nye, coined the term “soft power” in the 1980s. Nye has written that “Soft power is the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use … economic and military might to make others follow your will.”
Unlike real-world politics, there is no hard power in the online sphere. Soft power—essentially a synonym for coolness, received admiration, or genuine respect here—is the currency of social media. Obama exuded a presidential equanimity and global consciousness that drove worldwide perception of the United States up 15% during his eight years as president, according to Pew Research. That positive view of the States immediately suffered a precipitous drop when Trump took office in January. Where 64% of global citizens favored Obama, only 22% of them have a positive view of Trump.
These numbers, coupled with the fact that Trump’s first day in office inspired the single largest protest in U.S. history, underlie one simple conclusion: People simply don’t like Trump. They don’t like him in real life, and they don’t like him online. In the real world, they may laugh at his antics, they may watch his borderline syntax-less speeches, they may even obligingly vote for him as the least worst of two options, but they still don’t like him. Conveniently for the electioneering Trump, this fact can be hidden in real life, but online—where popularity among human users is truly democratic and organic—the numbers tell the whole story.
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