Facebook users seem to tire of presidential candidate parade

As presidential candidates have proliferated over the past several weeks, the excitement on Facebook has clearly waned.

When South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham announced his presidential candidacy Monday, 84,000 people took to Facebook to discuss his campaign, generating 142,000 interactions (likes, posts, comments and shares), the social media service announced Tuesday.

That’s about the same level of activity Democrat Martin O’Malley generated with his presidential announcement Saturday – 84,000 people generating 120,000 interactions. That’s better than former New York governor George Pataki did with his announcement Thursday (59,000 people; 81,000 interactions) but less than half of the 169,000 people and 266,000 interactions former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum generated Wednesday.

And all of these totals are far below the high levels of Day One Facebook activity generated by the first round of candidate announcements. The numbers represent totals for the 24-hour day of the candidate’s announcement.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz went first and generated 5.5 million interactions from 2.1 million people when he announced his campaign March 23.

Rand Paul’s April 7 announcement generated 1.9 million interactions from 865,000 unique users, and Hillary Clinton’s kickoff with a web video a week later set the high-water mark with 10.1 million Facebook interactions from 4.7 million unique people.

It seems very possible that Facebook users are simply showing announcement fatigue. Between the four of them, Graham, O’Malley, Pataki and Santorum combined to generate 609,000 interactions from 396,000 people on Facebook on the day of their announcements. That is less than half the 1.5 million interactions that retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson generated from 847,000 people when he announced his campaign May 4.

Since Americans love rankings, we’ll give you this: Thus far, Clinton and Cruz are 1 and 2 on Facebook by a country mile. Paul and Carson are clustered at 3 and 4; Florida’s Marco Rubio and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders generated 1.3 million and 1.2 million interactions respectively, claiming 5th and 6th place.

Everybody else is under 1 million interactions from fewer than 500,000 people, in the following order: former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, then Santorum, Graham, O’Malley and Pataki.

It will be interesting to see whether late arrivals to the campaign trail like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker can generate the kind of Facebook enthusiasm the early candidates were able to deploy.