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In Monday’s New Hampshire Republican Presidential Debate, Americans tuned in (and logged on) to listen to what the seven declared Republican hopefuls had to say.

In the immediate aftermath of the debate, Mitt Romney and Michelle Bachmann (who officially announced herself in the running on air tonight) each got high marks from the pundits — but the pundits are a tiny fraction of America’s millions of voters.

And many of those voters gave their silent approval for each would-be nominee by liking the debaters’ Facebook Pages.

Here’s some data from Likester, a startup that’s all about analyzing the data in Facebook Likes, on who “won” the debate in terms of sheer popularity with everyday American Facebook users.

The stand-out frontrunner was Mitt Romney, who ended the night with the greatest number of new Facebook Likes and the greatest overall Likes on his Page.

Michelle Bachmann ranked second in the number of new Likes on her Facebook Page, showing that her performance was more popular than that of Ron Paul, who has more overall Likes but fewer new Likes because of the debate.

Clear losers were Newt Gingrich, who gained few new Likes and saw a smaller percentage increase in Likes, and Rick Santorum, who had the greatest percentage increase and the lowest number of new and overall Facebook Likes.

Mitt Romney

image courtesy of Flickr, wacphiladelphia

Michelle Bachmann

image courtesy of Flickr, gageskidmore

Ron Paul

image courtesy of Flickr, gageskidmore

Newt Gingrich

image courtesy of Flickr, gageskidmore

Herman Cain

image courtesy of Flickr, gageskidmore

Tim Pawlenty

image courtesy of Flickr, gageskidmore

Rick Santorum

image courtesy of Flickr, gageskidmore

More About: 2012, debate, gop, gop debate, Political, politics, presidential, Republican

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Monday night’s New Hampshire Republican Presidential Debate had a huge impact on the web.

Current events are increasingly being mirrored in social media, and as we begin our journey down the 2012 campaign trail, it’s clear that the upcoming U.S. presidential election will uphold and even magnify that trend.

CNN hosted and broadcast the debate, and before the program started, they made it clear this event was social by design. The network’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief stated that relevant posts from Facebook, Twitter and CNN.com would be used in the on-air debate.

The official hashtag for the debate was #CNNDebate. Without question, the promotion and management of this hashtag was a huge success.

By around 9 p.m. ET, that term was the top non-promoted trending topic worldwide on Twitter. Users were live-tweeting the debate, adding to the conversations their own thoughts, opinions and questions. A few high-profile Twitter users such as journalist Anderson Cooper were even tweeting behind-the-scenes pictures and video from the debate hall.

We turned to Trendistic to see just how many tweets were about the debate. An hour and a half into the debate, the official hashtag appeared in nearly 1.5% of all tweets published across the service — that’s a staggeringly high figure.

By contrast, use of the term “Republican” peaked at around .13% of tweets, and the terms “GOP” and “debate” each peaked at under .5% of all tweets published during the debate.

However, in trying to analyze the sentiments expressed around the debate, we’re at a bit of a loss. Most natural language processing Twitter tools are still rather crude. Some of them pegged positive sentiment on the hashtag #CNNDebate at around 66%; however, the majority of the “positive” tweets were deeply sarcastic. For example, one typical and supposedly positive tweet reads, “Don’t know who won but I think we can all agree America was the loser tonight #CNNdebate.”

Stay tuned for more info on how each Republican debater performed on Facebook.

More About: 2012, debate, gop, gop debate, Political, politics, presidential, Republican

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The web is revving up for Monday night’s Republican debate between 2012 presidential hopefuls, and social media is set to play a large role in public discussion of the event.

In the brief clip below, CNN‘s DC Bureau Chief Sam Feist describes how CNN will incorporate social media into the New Hampshire Republican Presidential Debate.

Anyone discussing the debate online is encouraged to use the hashtag #CNNDebate, which will flag comments and questions for CNN staffers’ attention. The set for the debate will include a video monitor with a stream of Facebook, Twitter and CNN.com comments on the debate.

Some of the comments and questions might even be used on-air in the debate.

CurrentTV was using Twitter during debate coverage back in 2008. It will be interesting to see how social media in politics evolves during the 2012 campaign.

More About: 2012, debate, gop, gop debate, Political, politics, presidential, Republican

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