ShareThis, which provides a tool to web publishers to allow readers to submit content to social networking and bookmarking sites or email it to friends, has provided us with data on the amount of content being shared about each candidate and their respective running mates. And, as of yesterday, it shows Barack Obama with a commanding lead: 58% of stories shared using ShareThis are about the Senator from Illinois, compared to just 12% for the Senator from Arizona.
The huge disparity hasn’t always been the case though. Throughout September, content sharing across ShareThis’ network - which includes some 60,000 publishers and 90 million unique viewers - was dominated by stories about Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin, peaking at 72% on September 5th, immediately following the GOP convention.
And, perhaps as a result of the media’s fascination with Palin, the level of content shared about the Alaska Governor has continued to outpace that being shared about the man at the top of the Republican ticket. Prior to Palin’s selection, McCain was typically seeing 30-40% of the shares on any given day.
Meanwhile, the candidate getting the least love amongst content sharers is clearly Joe Biden, Democratic VP nominee. Following a brief bump after Obama named him as his VP selection, Biden has stayed consistently in the low single digits as a percentage of the total amount of content being shared about the candidates.
So does all of this data say more about voters, or more about the types of people who use social bookmarking tools and services like ShareThis? It’s probably a little bit of both. Obama has seen strong support from younger voters, who make up the majority of the userbase of many of the sites that ShareThis feeds into.
That said, combining the amount of sharing currently taking place of each candidate and their VP choice, and you arrive at percentages that aren’t too different than what we’re seeing in the national political polls: data over the past week has Obama/Biden receiving around 50-60% of the sharing, with McCain Palin at 40-50%.
The day-by-day stats from ShareThis are embedded below:
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