As we’re getting closer to the August primary, we can see that twitter conversations about the three main candidates are continuing:
Click to enlarge
But they’re not generating any excitement, that’s for sure, especially for Charlie Crist. In months previous, Crist has repeatedly broken through the 1K-per-day mark and often well beyond; his mentions staying below 1K in June seems to indicate a lack of building enthusiasm.
Let’s look, in summary, how the first six months of the year have worked out for each candidate:
| Month | Scott Total | Best Day | Crist Total | Best Day | Rich Total | Best Day |
| 1/14 | 40677 | 13459 | 10307 | 865 | 994 | 83 |
| 2/14 | 25388 | 2180 | 19512 | 1918 | 375 | 45 |
| 3/14 | 39760 | 3926 | 11416 | 1315 | 2277 | 145 |
| 4/14 | 42893 | 5518 | 16409 | 1255 | 3160 | 226 |
| 5/14 | 39264 | 2669 | 27425 | 5223 | 2545 | 176 |
| 6/14 | 44238 | 3048 | 14513 | 874 | 3671 | 223 |
Rick Scott has the power of incumbency, and it is keeping him high in the mentions. Even the end of the legislative season hasn’t diminished his mentions particularly. For Nan Rich, she’s grown her mentions dramatically from the beginning of the year, but she’s plateaued at a fairly low level.
Charlie Crist is the puzzling candidate. In May his numbers climbed up to a level that made him competitive with Rick Scott. It looked as though his team had mastered social media. But then in June he dropped back to levels not seen since winter. Part of this is a decrease in activity by the candidate himself; Crist sent about 70% of the tweets he did in May.
But the biggest change is the uptick in Scott’s activity: the Scott campaign and the official governor’s account sent out about 225 tweets in June compared to 90 in May. In comparison, in June Charlie Crist sent 74 tweets, and Nan Rich sent 72 tweets. As both Scott and Crist get about 200 mentions for every tweet, the additional effort by the Scott campaign led to its domination on Twitter. If Crist wants to generate a buzz on social media at the same level as the governor, he’s going to need to generate content just as frequently. It’s not hard to spot the governor’s uptick in activity almost in real-time; the Crist campaign could have easily responded quickly. Instead, they just took a piece off the board for no reason.
PS: About that #TeamCharlie hashtag. There’s a kid in the UK named Charlie Cox who has brain cancer, and, apparently, is using the same hashtag. Unfortunately for Crist, Charlie Cox is about as popular as Charlie Crist, and so the hashtag is useless…