Barack Obama was the president of the united states during the period of January 20, 2009, to January 20, 2017. In this short report I analyze his general Facebook posting behavior over these 8 years.

How did I obtain the data

I acquired the data from the official Facebook API last year. This was before the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, which made Facebook apply many more restrictions to its API.

Frequency of posts

The most straightforward question is how frequent did president Obama post over these 8 years. To answer this question, we plotted the number of posts he published each month. As we can see from the graph below, he almost kept a consistent behavior over these years. President obama posted around 28 posts per month in average.

Exact time of the posts

Another interesting question is about the exact posting times. In the graph below I see on which hours of the day did president Obama post more frequently. I splitted the data over the years. There are some interesting facts in the graph.

First of all president Obama posted rarely in early working hours. He only posted 20 posts between 4 to 13. This is less than 1% activity in the mentioned time window. The second interesting point is that in his early years of presidency he rarely posted between 23 to 4 in the morning.

Wordcloud of the used words

In the graph on the left side we can see the word cloud of the words used by president Obama. Obviously the most used words are "white" and "house"! Other than that, we can see that the topics health and climate were within the most mentioned issues president Obama ever wrote about.

What comes next?

In this short report I demonstrated a general picture of president Obama's posting behavior on Facebook. Of course we don't know if these posts are directly posted by president Obama himself (most probably not!). But we are certain that these posts reflect president Obama's priorities. Therefore, in my next analysis I will study how Obama's focus changed over the years of his presidency.