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Donald Trump

Trump neared 1 BILLION Facebook interactions last week

Paul Singer
USA TODAY
President-elect Donald Trump gives a speech during election night at the New York Hilton Midtown in New York on Nov. 8, 2016.

Donald Trump's stunning Election Day victory last week generated a similarly stunning avalanche of Facebook discussion about him, with nearly 1 billion (that is billion with a "b") likes, comments, shares and posts about him in the week ending Nov. 12.

Facebook users in the U.S. generated 962.6 million interactions involving Trump last week, more than triple his prior record-setting total of 307 million the week of October 16, in the wake of the release of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape of Trump talking about grabbing women. For her part, during election week, Hillary Clinton generated 412 million interactions on Facebook, the second highest volume for any candidate for the entire year.

The other interesting thing about this extraordinary election week traffic is the intensity of the users. Trump's interactions were generated by 83.4 million unique users, meaning that each user was generating on average more than 11 comments, shares and likes. Clinton's total was generated by 62.4 million users, for an average of 6.6 interactions per user. For comparison, both Clinton and Trump's previous high watermark during the campaign was about 8 interactions per user, and neither candidate ever exceeded 40 million unique users talking about them on Facebook in a single week.

It is also interesting to note that women made up more than 60 percent of the conversation on Facebook about Trump, Clinton and running mates Mike Pence and Tim Kaine last week.

One cautionary note: USA TODAY makes no attempt to analyze the sentiment of these Facebook interactions, only the total volume. There is no way to know how many are negative, how many are positive. But Trump clearly sees the volume of conversation about him as a measure of success. "The fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera, I think it helped me win all of these races where they’re spending much more money than I spent," Trump said in an interview with CBS News that aired on 60 Minutes Sunday. "I think that social media has more power than the money they spent, and I think maybe to a certain extent, I proved that."

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This data was provided by Facebook as part of a yearlong joint project with USA TODAY to track political Facebook activity in the 2016 Candidate Barometer.

2016 USA TODAY/Facebook candidate barometer

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