Jeb! campaign launch fails to excite Facebook

If social media activity means anything in politics -- and we're not sure it does -- Jeb Bush launched his campaign Monday with a Facebook deficit.

Facebook users responded to Bush's campaign announcement with a level of intensity far below the leaders in the Facebook primary -- Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz -- posting a score just ahead of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and just behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

On Monday, 493,000 U.S. Facebook users generated 849,000 interactions (likes, posts, comments, shares) related to Bush, according to data provided by the social media platform.

By comparison, former secretary of State Clinton scored 10.1 million interactions from 4.7 million users on the day of her launch and Texas Sen. Cruz racked up 5.5 million Facebook interactions from 2.1 million users.

Even neurosurgeon/activist Ben Carson nearly doubled Bush's Day One Facebook activity, generating 1.5 million interactions from 847,000 users when he announced his campaign May 4.

The other Florida Republican in the 2016 presidential race, Sen. Marco Rubio, also outperformed Bush on Facebook the day he announced his campaign, generating 1.3 million interactions from 695,000 people.

Also worth noting: The top five locales where Jeb Bush most dominated the Facebook conversation were Florida, D.C., Vermont, Maine and Oregon. Rubio also made his biggest first-day splash in Florida and D.C., but his next most active states were Alabama, New Mexico and Arizona.

This data tracks only raw volume of activity, not sentiment of the interactions. So candidates get credit for Facebook activity even if the user posted "That guy's a jerk."

While it's hard to tell what any of this data means, one thing we can say for sure: On the day he announced his campaign, Jeb Bush came in 7th on Facebook, 5th among Republican candidates.