Hillary Clinton is not only the undisputed (if undeclared) frontrunner among Democrats in the 2016 White House race, but the former secretary of state also handily beats her competitors–in her own party and the GOP–when it comes to Twitter "followers," CNN reported.

A whopping 2.7 million followers, roughly 1.5 percent of all eligible U.S. voters, are keeping track on the presumed candidate. The second-most popular among the twitterati, 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, comes in far behind at 1.6 million followers. Though Romney has a good following, he announced on Friday he would not run for president again, according to ABC.

But other Twitter stats also matter, CNN argued, and the news channel requested data to measure engagement rates, using numbers from the start of Clinton's book tour in June 2014. The result? The former first lady and New York senator scored close to 2 million mentions between June 1, 2014, and Jan. 23, 2015; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the second-place finisher, came in at some 800,000.

Maybe most encouraging for her operation is that Clinton still seems to have plenty of growth potential on the social network: Since June, she has logged a 74 percent increase in followers; her most prominent potential Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, managed an uptick of just 50 percent -- even though she has significantly fewer "followers," CNN detailed.

Social media has an increasingly important role as candidates vie for votes in the United States, and the Washington Post speculated that the 2016 race may turn out to be the nation's first "Instagram election."

The newspaper pointed to two videos – one in English, the other in Spanish – with which former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush announced his super PAC and which "appear to be filmed on a smartphone vertically as Bush walked down a sidewalk."

The endearing, "amateurish" way in which the sequences were shot is purposeful, the Washington Post claimed, "which is exactly where Bush posted them."

One of the first candidates to announce her presidential exploratory committee with a video, however, was, of course, Hillary Clinton, the paper recalled. In the 2007 spot, the then-senator said while she couldn't "visit everyone's living room," she could "try."

Related