In the race to the oval office, it is becoming increasingly clear that the more “friends” you have, the more money they’ll give you. 

New media analytics from OhMyGov reveal a clear pattern between social media popularity and campaign contributions for Republican 2012 candidates.  Between Q2 and Q3 (April 1, 2011-September 30, 2011), this is how the numbers stack up:

sources: fec.gov, mediamonitoring.ohmygov.com

Overall the top contender with the biggest financial contributions is Romney with 32.2 million, who also boasts the most Facebook Fans by almost 80,000 likes over second place, Ron Paul.  Paul’s financial contributions rank him third below Rick Perry, though in Facebook, Twitter Followers and Twitter Mentions, Ron Paul out-social-medias Perry.

Given that discrepancy, an important factor to consider when comparing social media success is geographical limitations—namely, there shouldn’t be any.  For social media efforts that reach across the breadth of the United States, the financial contributions should be spread somewhat equally.  The following charts from the Federal Election Commission illustrate the geographic sources for contributions received by the top three social media contenders. 

The highest concentration of financial contributions for Perry come from his gubernatorial constituents, while the leaders in social media exposure - Romney and Paul - enjoy large contributions from around the nation.  This suggests a higher relationship between social media efforts and financial contributions for the two reigning Facebook fan champs.   

While Romney, Perry and Paul take turns leading the pack in social media mentions, perhaps the surest confirmation of money and friends is what happens when you don’t have either.

Santorum rounds out the candidates with the lowest financial contribution amount at about $1.2 million.  He also comes in last in nearly every other metric (trailing behind Romney’s Facebook counter by over 270,000 likes) except new Twitter followers, where he squeaks out 7,000 more than Gingrich.  And we’re not exactly saying Gingrich is the one to model on Twitter.

In fact, in Newt Gingrich’s case, the more money you have, the more followers you can buy—though he’s finding out the hard way that fake Twitter followers don’t contribute back to your campaign. 

Despite in-depth analysis that attempts to pick apart why exactly Gingrich’s nearly 1.4 million followers are fake based on the content of their profiles, lack of tweets and fraudulence of email addresses (all valid metrics), there is a far quicker way to determine why the candidate with more than twice the other candidates’ Twitter followers combined is blowing a lot of hot tweets. 

OhMyGov analysis shows the birth of the Republican candidates’ Twitter feeds in late 2010, with most candidates starting out slowly.  Somehow Gingrich managed to accelerate from 1 to 1.2 million in just on week, indicating a less than honest acquisition of friends.   The next closest Twitter candidate was Ron Paul with 140,000 followers by the end of September, one year later.  Between April 2011 and September 2011 the Twitter followers of all the candidates grew steadily—growing between 100-200% in size.

All, that is, except Gingrich who according to OhMyGov analysis barely managed to grow 1.7%.  It seems he topped out in the first week he tweeted.

Overall, social media efforts seem to have a strong relationship to contributions fed back into the campaign, and it would benefit candidates financially to continue to maintain a strong online presence. And in Gingrich’s case, he would do well to remember that not all that Twitters is campaign gold.