With Newt Gingrich suspending his campaign today, Mitt Romney will finally be considered the presumptive Republican nominee. Only one person stands between him and the White House: President Barack Obama.
The two will wage electoral war from now until November, but how do their social profiles compare?
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Barack Obama
Barack Obama's Facebook presence is mighty -- more than 26 million followers and 283,000 "talking about this." The president uses his Facebook feed to share infographics about hot topics such as student loan reform and job creation, videos from the campaign and from the Oval Office and behind-the-scenes photos of life in the White House.
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His posts routinely generate tens of thousands of "likes" and "shares," as you might expect for someone with so many subscribers. Users can also access the campaign merchandise shop or donate to Obama for America directly from the page.
Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney's Facebook page has slightly less-impressive statistics -- fewer than two million followers and about 127,000 people "talking about this." Romney's page is less infographic-driven than Obama's. Instead, there's a focus on campaign ads, text-based updates and Instagram photos.
Romney's Facebook page also lets you easily buy campaign swag, but the other features are more engagement-focused. Users are encouraged to "Stand With Mitt" by uploading a photo or video of themselves in Romney gear or volunteering for the campaign.
Barack Obama
President Obama's campaign account, @BarackObama, is typically run by the president's campaign team -- tweets written by the president are signed "-BO." It has nearly 15 million followers, another digital advantage of the incumbency.
The president's Twitter page has an added graphic showing a countdown to November's Election Day, probably to spark a sense of urgency in supporters and volunteers. The page also prominently features links to other relevant accounts, such as @MichelleObama, @JoeBiden and @Obama2012 -- the latter of which is the official Twitter account of the re-election campaign.
Once Romney became the assumed Republican nominee, the Obama Twitter team started calling him out by his handle, attacking his policies and statements.
Obama's team often uses hashtag campaigns to rally supporters around an issue or as a call to action, such as #RegToVote, a call to get users registered to cast a ballot on Nov. 6. As with other hashtag campaigns, they've been known to get hijacked by the competition.
Mitt Romney
@MittRomney has a fraction of the followers Obama has, but at a hair under 500,000, he's still amassed an impressive number. The account tweets somewhat sporadically, occasionally going days between updates. The Romney Twitter account has actively been attacking Obama policies for months.
The Romney digital team has also opened other campaign Twitter accounts. Ann Romney, Mitt's wife, joined the microblogging service as @AnnDRomney to defend her role as stay-at-home-mom in the Romney household.
YouTube
Barack Obama
YouTube is playing a key role in both campaigns, allowing candidates to transmit video content without paying for television airtime.
The Obama campaign has created many longer-form, documentary-style videos intended to get potentially disillusioned supporters back on board -- "fired up, ready to go," as the president might say. These videos often showcase a multitude of the president's accomplishments, such as health care reform and the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
Obama's shorter videos focus in on singular issues, such as one recently released web ad suggesting Romney wouldn't have decided to launch the mission that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.
The Obama campaign has more than 180 million total YouTube views.
Mitt Romney
Romney has produced almost entirely videos of only a few minutes' length. Many of them are designed as attack ads, going after President Obama's record. A handful, though, are positive -- one, called "Family," shows life at the Romney residence.
Team Romney's YouTube videos have about 6.5 million total views.
Google+
Barack Obama
On Google+, Barack Obama's page is all about multimedia content. In fact, nearly all of the material shared on the president's profile is either a video or an image of some kind, shared to more than one million followers.
President Obama was also the first sitting president to engage citizens via a Google+ Hangout last January -- a modern-day incarnation of Franklin Delanor Roosevelt's historic Fireside Chats.
Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney carries about half a million followers on Google's social network, often sharing web ads and other visual content. Romney's team posts text-based updates on Google+ much more often then their counterparts at the Obama campaign. Those updates certainly spark a lot of conversation -- most have at least 100 comments.
Romney has also held not one, but two Google+ hangouts -- one in 2011 and another last March.
Barack Obama
That's right, both presidential campaigns are on the image-heavy Pinterest network. President Obama's page is a smattering of infographics, behind-the-scenes pictures of the campaign and life in the White House. It's even got a list of Obama-inspired recipes, such as cupcakes with his famous campaign logo.
Mitt Romney
Team Romney's Pinterest page is actually run by Ann -- perhaps a courting of the site's mostly female demographic. Pinboards include "Crafts/DIY," "Family" and "Recipes."
Pinterest may actually prove vital to the Romney campaign. The former governor is often criticized for seeming "too rigid," and the pin-based network gives Ann a chance to show the more playful side of Mitt and the rest of the family to combat that narrative.
And on to November
There's a touch over six months left in election season, giving both campaigns plenty of time to experiment with new platforms and other uses of social media. What do you think they'll come up with? Sound off in the comments below.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke
This story originally published on Mashable here.
