As Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump sprint towards the finish line in the race for the US Presidency, a Kolsquare social media listening analysis of Instagram and TikTok reveals which of the two candidates is dominating social media.
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2024 is the year of elections. From India to Europe, Indonesia, Great Britain, Mexico, and the United States, roughly half of the world’s population will have headed to the polls by the time the year is out.
And with 51% of adults globally getting their news from social media, the cascade of elections around the world in 2024 has been notable not only for the winners and losers, but for the extent to which candidates have cosied up to social media influencers to curry votes.
It has also been notable for the new willingness of influencers and content creators to use their platforms to discuss issues and candidates.
In India for example, right-wing nationalist Prime Minister Neranda Modi attended an event alongside BeerBiceps (7.91M followers YouTube), while in France, golden-boy streamer Squeezie (@xsqueezie, 19.1M followers YouTube) made an impassioned plea for his followers to vote against the far right in snap legislative elections.
But nowhere has the phenomenon been more pronounced than in the US, the birthplace of social media and where in 2024, the major parties' influencer strategies form a key pillar of the 360° campaign to get out the vote.
In the final weeks of the campaign, both Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris are increasing their interactions with powerful influencers. Both candidates reportedly considering being interviewed on Spotify’s most popular podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, which has 17.3 million subscribers and has racked up more than 5 billion views since it launched in 2009.
Harris’ social media team has been notable for jumping on the TikTok Brat trend. In October, the candidate sat for an interview on the most listened to podcast by women — and number two behind the Joe Rogan Experience on the Spotify US charts — Call Her Daddy (@alexandracooper, 3.2M followers Instagram).
Trump meanwhile, has focused his attentions on TikTok’s so-called ‘dude’ influencers', appearing on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast (4.3M followers, YouTube), and dancing in TikTok content with Gen Z gamer Adin Ross (@adinross, 7.18M followers, Instagram).
Traditional media loves to hate it. From grumbling about softball questions from ‘friendly’ podcasters to complaints that candidates are not doing enough sit-down interviews with real journalists, ink is being spilled and the airways filled with debate about the influencer trend which has upended political campaigning in 2024.
Why Trump and Harris are focused on influencers and creators is obvious. With the race for the Presidency too close to call, candidates are looking for new voters wherever they can find them.
American adults spend nearly two hours a day using social media, with 82% of social media users following at least one type of social media personality, whether it is an influencer or content creator.
And with Gen Z spending 41% of their social media time on TikTok, the path to reaching new, persuadable voters with the potential to tip the result is clear.
With this in mind, we fired up Kolsquare’s powerful social media listening tool to see which candidate is winning the social media war.
Following is an analysis of how the US presidential election candidates and their teams are performing on TikTok and Instagram.
The analysis tracks the performance of Vice President Kamala Harris (@kamalaharris), Donald Trump (@realdonaldtrump) and their campaign teams (@kamalahq, @teamtrump) across Instagram and TikTok over the three months from July 1 to October 7, 2024. It analyses the KOLs talking about these mentions with an audience of >30% in the US.
The time frame covers key election events including both campaign conventions, President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would not run for a second term, the two Trump assassination attempts, and the presidential debate in early September.
Despite having significantly fewer followers than her rival, Vice President Kamala Harris (@kamalaharris, 18.61M followers) is outperforming Donald Trump (@donaldtrump, 26.75M followers) across all key metrics on Instagram, with a larger total share of KOLs mentioning her, producing content and generating engagements going her way.
Harris has 3.89K influencers mentioning her on Instagram — compared to 2.22K who mention Trump — and generating twice the number of Posts, Reels and engagements.
But despite having double the content than Trump, Harris’ engagement rate is only slightly higher than Trump’s, at 2.43% compared to 2.29%.
The pattern is similar for the candidates’ official campaign accounts.
@kamalahq (1.8M followers) beats @teamtrump (3.59M followers) when it comes to the number of KOLs and content volumes, but falls short on the key metric of engagement. Here, despite being mentioned in roughly half the amount of content, @teamtrump has generated an impressive 3.16% engagement rate compared to 2.67% for @kamalahq.
Trump’s strong engagement rates could be explained by the fact that he is well-known by the electorate and his base is fervent and vocal in their support. Harris, meanwhile, is still working to let voters know who she is, and to convince them why she represents a positive change from the unpopular current president.
Engagement rates aside, Harris’ message is clearly dominating Trump’s on Instagram; her personal account commands a 47.9% share of voice based on content, compared to 23.5% for Trump’s personal account.
When combined with the team accounts, Harris wins Instagram with 64.4% share of voice for content, and 55.4% share of voice for engagement volume, compared to Trump’s 30.7% and 41.2% respectively.
41 million Gen Z Americans will be eligible to vote come November 5, including 8 million potentially heading for the polls for the first time. That’s a lot of untapped ballots in the candidates' sights, making TikTok a prime hunting ground for both campaigns.
On the face of it, Donald Trump, with nearly double the amount of followers than Kamala Harris, is dominating the platform with more than double the creators generating three times the amount of posts than is being created for Harris.
But although Trump’s supporters are flooding the platform with content, TikTokers are clearly more engaged with content that tags @kamalaharris than content tagging @realdonaldtrump.
In a reverse of the engagement trends on Instagram, Harris has generated 8.44M engagements on just 330 posts, compared to 8.53M engagements generated on 969 posts for Trump.
Meanwhile, the sophistication of the Harris campaign’s social media game is clear to see: @kamalahq is beating both @realdonaldtrump and @teamtrump on the number of KOLs sharing content, on engagement volume and engagement rate.
@kamalahq holds a massive lead with 446 KOLs, 879 posts and 9.1M engagements, compared to 108 KOLs mentioning @teamtrump in 132 posts that generated 3.41M engagements.
When combining the impact of @kamalahq with @kamalaharris and comparing it to the combined impact of @realdonaldtrump and @teamtrump, Harris has a marginal lead (51.8%) on TikTok over Trump (47.5%) in share of voice by content, but holds a significant lead on engagement volume, 59.5% to 40.5%.
With the US presidential election to be won or lost by a handful of votes in a few key states, the question of whether the candidates are reaching the right audiences on social media is essential, if somewhat tricky, to answer.
The Kolsquare data shows that candidates’ social media followings are as polarised along gender lines as the political landscape itself.
70% of @kamalaharris’ audience on Instagram and 65% of her TikTok audience is female, and more than half of her audience (57.6%) on Instagram is aged 18 - 34. The vast majority of Harris' and her team’s Instagram audience (80.9%, 88.2% respectively) are based in the US.
Meanwhile 65% of @realdonaldtrump’s audience on Instagram and on TikTok is male, with 61.4% of his Instagram audience aged 18-34. But just 48.7% of Trump’s Instagram’s audience and 63.1% of @teamtrump’s audience is based in the US.
The analysis of the candidates' social media campaigns confirms the view widely held in mature influencer marketing circles: follower count is not a guarantor of success on social.
Trump has millions more followers than Harris but many of them are not located where he needs them to be. And on TikTok, Trump's huge following is not translating into massive amounts of organic content or engagement being created on his behalf.
Finally, we’d love to be able to tell you whether the campaigns are reaching Gen Z social media users in Pittsburgh or Atlanta, but with thousands of KOLs being activated for both camps, it is nigh on impossible to see a detailed breakdown of where in America their audiences are based, short of examining the profiles one-by-one.
Something the campaigns’ social media teams, no doubt, are working on as we speak. If they’re savvy influencer marketers, that is 😉
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, offering a data-driven solution that empowers brands to scale their KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing strategies through authentic partnerships with top creators.
Kolsquare’s advanced technology helps marketing professionals seamlessly identify the best content creators by filtering their content and audience, while also enabling them to build, manage, and optimize campaigns from start to finish. This includes measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors.
With a thriving global community of influencer marketing experts, Kolsquare serves hundreds of customers—including Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, Lush, and Hermès—by leveraging the latest Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning technologies. Our platform taps into an extensive network of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers across 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat.
As a Certified B Corporation, Kolsquare leads the way in promoting Responsible Influence, championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations that inspire positive change.
Since October 2024, Kolsquare has become part of the Team.Blue group, one of the largest private tech companies in Europe, and a leading digital enabler for businesses and entrepreneurs across Europe. Team.Blue brings together over 60 successful brands in web hosting, domains, e-commerce, online compliance, lead generation, application solutions, and social media.
