Rep. Ryan earns Romney positive buzz on Twitter

The selection of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as his running mate earned Mitt Romney a positive bump on Twitter over the weekend. 

For two days in a row over the weekend, Romney passed President Obama in positive Twitter conversations, which marked the first time he had done so all week, according to Twitter's Political Index.

The index, which ranks the candidates according to positive or negative tweets on a scale of 100, showed Romney's score jumped 25 points on Saturday to 39 and kept ticking up, to 44 on Sunday. Obama's score was 32 on Saturday and 36 on Sunday. Romney had trailed the president's score all the previous week. 

Twitter also started comparing online conversations around Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden over the weekend. Ryan earned 60 on the Twitter scale Saturday compared to Biden's 37. The quickness of the opposition's attacks seemed to bring about a fast drop for the new VP candidate, and he was back down to 49 on Sunday, when Biden went up to 48 on the scale. 

According to Twitter, anything over 50 is mostly positive and anything under mostly negative.

The Internet was already buzzing over the possibility of Ryan's selection as VP the day before the announcement, and on Twitter the House Budget Committee chairman earned much more conversation than the list of other likely veep candidates.

The Romney campaign was ready to build on that interest, reserving @PaulRyanVP on Twitter shortly before the announcement early Saturday. The account already has 81,944 followers; his congressional account @RepPaulRyan has 184,400.

When Romney announced Ryan as his vice president Saturday morning, Twitter says conversations about Ryan hit 3,749 tweets per minute.

Of course, that's nowhere near the high number of tweets (13,166 per minute) seen during the Supreme Court's ruling on the healthcare legislation. But it was a Saturday morning.

Chart provided by Twitter.

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