Walz enters the race with a bang
We've been writing a lot about the presidential race recently, but to be fair, there's a lot happening right now! So forgive us as the saga continues. Today we're going to be looking at the announcement of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as Kamala Harris's VP pick, specifically as it compared to JD Vance's launch at the RNC.
The chart below shows the disparity in public interest to reporting about the Walz announcement compared to Vance, with Walz getting almost 4x the engagement coverage that Vance did. This also correlated with a higher level of media interest, with 16k articles written about the Minnesota governor compared to just under 8k about the senator from Ohio.
This theme continued across social media. Walz has received significantly more engagement to mentions on various social platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok.
Top posts included Barack Obama's praise for the governor on Facebook, Pete Buttigieg's on X, and Kamala Harris posting her phone call asking him to join her campaign on TikTok, the latter of which saw more than half a million engagements. Amidst the enthusiasm there was also early criticism from Republicans, and a post from Charlie Kirk was one of the top posts on X.
This is, of course, only a snapshot in time looking at a single day online, but does show the level of engagement Walz brings to the race. We'll have more insight on how this evolves as the campaign progresses toward November.
The Olympics are getting a LOT of engagement
We’re now into the second week of Olympics coverage, and it’s fair to say the games have grabbed people’s attention. Even in a vacuum, 45 million engagements still sounds like a lot, but put into context with the other big sporting events of the summer the Olympic Games are truly in a class of their own.
The Euros and the Copa America both took place earlier in the summer, and English-language coverage received 9.7 million engagements and 2.3 million engagements respectively. These are not insignificant numbers, but there was an early clue how much interest the Olympics were going to drive. Even a month before the games began, there were days when they were receiving more engagement than the soccer events that were actively happening.
This then jumped when the games themselves started, as the Olympics also enjoyed the luxury of being the only major sporting event in town, with nothing running concurrently.
This level of earned media represents a huge opportunity for the brands sponsoring the games, with a huge amount of organic attention being paid, and it’s clearly resonating with the public in a massive way, and we illustrate that with a couple of examples in our full blog here.
In terms of the top publishers covering the Olympics, a mix of mainstream news outlets stand out. The Daily Mail earned the highest overall engagement, accumulating over 1.25 million engagements with its 6.6k articles. Today.com, while trailing behind with a total of 894k engagements, achieved that number from only 443 articles, a fraction of what the Daily Mail's output was.
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