Clinton embraces gay pride; Trump embraces all things 'independent'

With the holiday weekend bearing down upon us, this was a sluggish week on social media for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but the Donald continues to trend ahead of Hillary in accumulating likes, shares and comments.

Donald Trump once proclaimed that he loves ‘the poorly educated‘. Now we can add  ‘independent voters’ to the list of things Trump loves, according to his most popular post for the week.

In a Facebook post promoting a recent Fox News poll that showed him ahead of Clinton, he thanked independent voters and made an appeal to broaden his support among this critical group. His post supporting an ‘independent UK’ also trended, following on the heels of his controversial statements about the Brexit vote.

However, the top performing post of the week came from Hillary Clinton.

The candidate’s surprise appearance at New York City’s Gay Pride parade on Sunday generated  a spike in likes, shares and comments early in the week. In an unannounced campaign stop, she strolled with revelers for 15 minutes, likely making her the first major party nominee to do so while campaigning for president. Then she posted about it on Facebook. “Happy ‪#‎NYCPride‬!” was all her post about the event said. It was enough. The post was the top performing candidate post of the week with 152,015 likes.

How the candidates are trending on Facebook:

We track the candidate’s Facebook accounts to see who gets the most interactions (the sum of all likes, shares and comments) each day. Here’s a snapshot for the 60-day period ending this week:

Data source: CrowdTangle API. Above: Total interactions for each candidate’s official campaign account on Facebook for the prior 60-day period ending on the date noted above. Below: Number of posts per day to the candidate’s Facebook accounts. Current week demarcated by dashed line.

Although Trump continued to trend above Clinton this week in terms of likes, shares and comments, neither candidate received the kind of attention they got earlier in the month despite making an average number of posts for the week.  Some weeks are like that. Even on the campaign trail.

Kate Stohr is a data journalist and community builder based in San Francisco, CA.