Hillary Clinton's Facebook engagement trounces Cruz, Paul
When it comes to firing up Facebook, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is already winning the 2016 campaign.
Clinton's Sunday announcement that she is running for president nearly 10.1 million interactions including likes, posts, comments and shares from 4.7 million people in a 24 hour period, Facebook said Monday.
Her announcement video was viewed over 1.8 million times on the site.
By comparison, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's announcement generated 5.5 million interactions from 2.1 million people, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul got just 1.9 million interactions from 865,000 people.
That means Clinton's traffic increased by a factor of 17 during the 24 hours of her announcement: On average, in the past 90 days, she has been the subject of conversation by about 270,000 people a day on Facebook.
The top traffic on announcement day came unsurprisingly from the District of Columbia, the nation's political capital. The second-most engagement came from Arkansas, where Clinton was once first lady. The next three states with the most chatter about Clinton came from West Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois.
In the week leading up to her announcement, Facebook said that the political topics that generated the most discussion were government ethics and foreign policy and international relations. The start of Clinton's campaign came as she was still under scrutiny for using a personal e-mail address during her time at the head of the State Department as well as the Clinton's Foundations acceptance of donations from foreign governments.
Clinton Foundation officials confirmed to CBS News Sunday that Clinton is stepping down from her post there.