In contrast, Trump is exceeding his 2016 performance.
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The Crowdtangle data shows that average engagement with Trumps posts also grew between the 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Biden has also failed to achieve the levels of engagement on Facebook that Clinton had in 2016.
The Democrats have allowed their position to fall back while the Republicans have stormed forward.

This decline in shares is also evident when comparing shares of posts by Clinton and Biden.
Although Bidens followers are few, they are very active.
However, because they are less likely to share posts, content is not spreading as effectively.

This is most clearly seen through average video views.
As videos mainly auto-play on Facebook, this shows the reach posts achieved.
In 2016, Clinton gathered 423,429 views per video post to Trumps 346,532.

Her audience was extremely effective in sharing videos and content was clearly engaging.
However, today Biden has fallen badly behind with 130,737 views per video post to Trumps 441,722.
Although Biden has an engaged audience, his messages dont appear to be getting to the Facebook population.

Overall, the picture today is remarkably similar to 2016.
Engagement on Facebook matters, and its in this popularity contest that Trump is succeeding once again.
And at the moment, more people on Facebook are doing this for Trump than for Biden.

This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyTristan Hotham, PhD Researcher,University of Bathunder a Creative Commons license.
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