NEW YORK (September 16, 2024) —
Zelf, a leading social media analytics company that uses advanced proprietary AI technology to analyze TikTok videos, today released findings of its latest Zelf Political Report, revealing that net positive sentiment about Kamala Harris increased on the social media platform in the three days after the presidential debate, from 34% to 54%. While net sentiment about Donald Trump was negative before the debate, the candidate did experience a slight improvement in the three days after, with his scoring going from -49% to -42%. Harris received more positive sentiment than Trump on most of the top issues, including fitness to serve as president (80% positive vs 87% negative for Trump).
The Zelf analysis looked at 30,124 videos on TikTok between Sept. 7 and Sept. 13. All sentiment scores are based on an average three-day rolling score before and after the debate.
Trump videos were generating more negative sentiment than Harris videos across all issues after the debate, including women’s rights (96% negative vs 94% positive for Harris) and China/Russia (56% negative vs 51% negative for Harris). Trump’s score on his key issue of immigration was also more negative than Harris (74% negative vs 53% negative for Harris), with many posts ridiculing the claims the former president made during the debate about pets being eaten by immigrants.
“Kamala Harris clearly won the popular vote on TikTok after her performance at the presidential debate against Donald Trump,” said Pepijn van Kesteren, CEO and co-founder of Zelf. “TikTok is a hotly contested electoral battleground and users are seriously engaged. With over 170 million Americans using the platform—40% of whom turn to it as their main source of news—this is the TikTok presidential election.”
NBC News and MSNBC Score Top TikTok Videos From Debate Night:
- NBC News clip from the debate where Harris responded to Trump’s comments about gun rights. (50.9 million views, 89,800 comments, 9.1% engagement rate by 9/13)
- MSNBC clip of the moderators fact-checking Trump. (43 million views, 78,000 comments, 9.54% engagement rate by 9/13)
Additional Key Findings:
- Cost of living drops out of the top 10 issues on political TikTok: Going into the debate, inflation was the fourth-most discussed issue on the platform, after women’s rights, gun rights, and presidential fitness. In the wake of Tuesday’s debate, it dropped to 11th place, behind such issues as presidential fitness, immigration, and women’s rights.
- Harris' content received more views: People posted 28,054 videos about Harris on Sept. 11 and 12, while there were 47,821 videos about Trump. But content about Harris received 914,039,693 views over those two days, compared to 865,721,347 for Trump.
- Pets comment by Trump generated ridicule: Trump’s claims during the debate that immigrants were eating pets gained a lot of attention on TikTok–most of it negative. After the debate, 74% of Trump videos were negative (with 26% positive), while Harris videos were 54% negative (with 46% positive).
Zelf's unique AI-powered platform generates extensive video sentiment analysis from TikTok, which boasts over one billion monthly active users. With one-of-a-kind insights into conversations about global events and politics taking place on the social media platform, Zelf can monitor trends and identify key influencers. The tool is also used by major brands to generate insights on customers and improve engagement with them.
For more information, visit
https://hellozelf.com/Guidelines for use of Zelf data and graphs: Must credit/caption graphs as courtesy of Zelf. Must hyperlink to hellozelf.com.
Methodology
For this report, Zelf conducted a comprehensive assessment of 30,124 TikTok videos Sept. 7-13, which mentioned Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, as well as key political issues such as immigration, inflation, and reproductive rights. The Zelf assessment monitored the number of videos, views, and engagements, as well as whether the videos were positive, neutral, or negative for any of the candidates or policies being measured. A key metric that Zelf uses is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is an assessment of how positive or negative discourse is about an individual, issue, or topic within a given timeframe, weighted based on video engagement. For an individual commercial post, Zelf accurately ascribes sentiment 97.5% of the time. Measuring political posts is more complex as sentiments are often far more nuanced with some posts expressing both positive and negative sentiments. For individual political posts, Zelf accurately ascribes sentiment 85-90% of the time. Measuring those posts at scale, Zelf's analysis offers the most accurate snapshot by far of political discourse on TikTok. As Zelf continues to analyze political content, it's already high overall accuracy will continue to increase.
Contact: Matt Goodman at
matt@theleadpr.com***
About Zelf
Zelf is the leading TikTok listening and analytics platform, built with and for companies that are prioritizing the video-based internet for marketing and insights. Zelf gathers organic, people-generated content on TikTok at scale and applies advanced video analytics capabilities to watch and summarize every video. Zelf then provides premier insights, monitors reputation, and allows brands to get ahead of the curve in a world where organic content dominates distribution and consumption.
