Yesterday, President Obama announced his 2012 Presidential Campaign via YouTube video (posted below). The clip was viewed over 100,000 times yesterday. Considering the amount of attention the video drew in the press -- it remains one of our Trending Videos -- and across social media, we decided to look at how the announcement video was shared online.*

The first wave of buzz around the video came very early in the morning, as influential tweets -- in sharing terms -- were posted by Politico's Mike Allen, then by ABC's Jake Tapper and Mark Scott. The first official news account to tweet out the video was BBCWorld. Later in the afternoon, the President's official account tweeted it as well, creating a second wave of attention on that platform.

(Interestingly, this was the second "launch of the 2012 campaign" video to go viral, with a faux announcement video posted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee on April Fools Day that drew 562,000 views over the weekend.)

A look back at YouTube search data from the 2008 campaign shows that the biggest surge in search interest is likely a ways off, but it will be interesting to follow the weekly peaks and valleys as the campaigns truly get underway.



Mouse over the points to see the corresponding campaign events. For more recent search info on "Obama" searches, check out our post 12 Months of Searching for Obama.

*Note: We only looked at shares of the actual YouTube video and not shares of articles containing the video, such as this one from the Huffington Post, which was also popularly shared.