HispanicBusiness

President Obama is far more active online than Mitt Romney, and so are his followers, says a study of the digital presidential campaign out today.

Most of the conversation goes one way: Neither campaign prominently features digital content posted by its followers and supporters, the study from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism concludes.

Pew examined online activity by the two presidential campaigns during two weeks in June, including their presence on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook and posts on the campaigns' own websites. The Obama campaign is on nine different online platforms, including Pinterest, Instagram and Spotify; the Romney campaign is on seven.

During that time, the Obama campaign published 614 posts across all digital platforms, compared with the Romney campaign's 168 posts.

The disparity was greatest on Twitter: @BarackObama and @Obama2012 together tweeted an average of 29 times a day, while @MittRomney averaged one tweet daily. The contest is closer on Facebook: Romney posted 34 times on Facebook, compared with Obama's 27 during the two weeks studied.

Obama got more reaction: an average of 466 likes per video on YouTube, compared with 253 likes for Romney. On Facebook, Obama drew an average of 2,938 comments per post, compared with 1,941 for Romney.

The Romney campaign says @MittRomney tweets only what the governor would really say. "Our Twitter handle is in the guv's voice from the guv, and he is aware of it," digital strategist Zac Moffatt says. Tweets from @TeamRomney were not included in the study.

Tweets from @BarackObama that are actually written by the president are signed "-bo."

Though Obama's 27.8 million "likes" dwarf Romney's 4.6 million, the Romney campaign points to Facebook data showing that Romney's "likes" have been increasing faster than Obama's. Romney also outscores Obama in Facebook's tracking of "most talked about" pages: 1.6million people to 1.4 million.

Romney's posts were more likely to be about Obama than vice versa, the study found: 34% to 14%.

The report notes that campaigns seldom rely on independent sources to back up their websites: Just 5% of links went to a mainstream news story.

Obama's website is intended to give users "unfiltered" information about his positions, says Adam Fetcher, campaign spokesman. "If we can have an unfiltered conversation with somebody, that's the best tactic we can use."