TweetReach Blog

The 54th Annual Grammy Awards were held in Los Angeles last weekend on Sunday, February 12, 2012. More than 39 million viewers tuned in to watch their favorite bands, musicians and artists come together for a few hours during what many refer to as “music’s biggest night.”

During the broadcast on Sunday, the official #GRAMMYs hashtag was tweeted 2.1 million times by more than 700K people, generating a unique reach of nearly 60 million. At its peak, use of the #GRAMMYs hashtag spiked up to 18,000 tweets per minute.

Twitter buzzed about…

Check out this stream graph of tweets about the most popular artists (click through for the interactive version). Each colored layer represents tweets about one artist. The spikes on the graph illustrate tweet volume throughout the show.

The most-talked about artists during the 2012 Grammy Awards were:

1. Adele: 340K tweets
2. Chris Brown: 152K tweets
3. Nicki Minaj: 85K tweets
4. Rihanna: 81K tweets
5. Taylor Swift: 68K tweets
6. Whitney Houston: 66K tweets
7. Bruno Mars: 60K tweets
8. Foo Fighters: 52K tweets
9. Lady Gaga: 43K tweets
10. Katy Perry: 41K tweets

Whitney Houston passed away suddenly on Saturday, which had a big impact on this year’s Grammys. The show’s touching tribute to the singer generated a lot of buzz on Twitter as fans and friends remembered Whitney and her music; there were more than 66,000 tweets about Whitney during the show.

Adele was the night’s big winner, taking home all six of the Grammys for which she was nominated. She also garned the most Twitter attention of any artist; Adele was mentioned in 340K tweets last night! Many felt that Adele’s performance was the show’s best, especially since it was her first major appearance since she had vocal cord surgery last November. In particular, many Twitterers mentioned how strong her voice sounded, and how they preferred Adele’s simple vocal performance to some of the night’s other, more choreographed numbers.

Chris Brown ignited a great deal of controversy at this year’s awards, appearing at the Grammys for the first time since he was arrested for abusing his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009. The more than 150K tweets about his two Grammy performances last night ranged from disbelief and anger at his inclusion to support from his fans.

Nicki Minaj generated an entirely different kind of controversy with her red carpet entrance and subsequent performance of her new song, “Roman Holiday.” Viewer opinions varied, with some finding it interesting, bold or weird, while others (like the Catholic Church) found it offensive.

What did you think of the 2012 Grammy Awards? What was your favorite performance?

Interested in stream graphs? Give this paper by Byron and Wattenberg a read. 

Last weekend, we worked with ESPN to track tweets about the 2012 Winter X Games in Aspen, Colorado, held January 26 through January 29, 2012. It was a big event, accumulating 171,373 tweets over the four days of competition!

During last summer’s X Games, we tracked 188K tweets from 97K contributors, for an overall reach of 37.7 million. This year’s Winter X Games generated 171K tweets from 100K contributors and an overall reach of 37.9 million. Two days into these games, here were the stats:

Sadly, freeskier and X Games gold medalist Sarah Burke died a week before the games. ESPN aired a tribute for Sarah on Thursday night and the #CelebrateSarah hashtag was used in more than 3,500 tweets during the games.

Sunday, January 29, was a big day for the games, featuring the final competitions for two fan favorites – the Snowmobile Best Trick and Men’s Snowboard Superpipe. Athletes like Heath Frisby, Shaun White, and Justin Hoyer generated a lot of Twitter buzz, and Heath’s first-ever snowmobile front flip resulted in the highest tweet spike of the entire games (1,634 tweets per minute).

By the end of the Winter X Games, the most retweeted tweet was from @espn and referred to snowboarder Shaun White’s perfect score in the Snowboard Superpipe Final. It got 1,428 retweets and generated 3.3 million impressions.

It was a great four days! We’re already looking forward to next year.

The results are in – the Golden Globes were held last night and the Twitter traffic was off the charts! TweetReach, in partnership with mhCarter Consulting and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, tracked and analyzed all of the tweets during the broadcast of the 69th annual awards show.

We watched for all mentions of Golden Globes during the broadcast and with close to 1 million tweets from almost 300,000 contributors generating over 2.2 billion impressions, the results came in at three times the Twitter volume we saw in 2011.

While “The Artist” and “The Descendants” walked away with most of the awards, what tweets drove the buzz? Check out the infographic below for the details!

Today, Apple held a 90-minute event announcing their new iPhone and operating system upgrades. We tracked 319K tweets about the iPhone event, generating a reach of 40.3 million and 522 million impressions, from more than 175K different Twitter accounts.

Here’s a quick graph of tweet traffic during the iPhone event (graph times are in CDT). The first big spike hit 11,200 tweets per minute (tpm) at the announcement of iOS 5 coming to devices on October 12. The second major spike happened when the new iPhone 4S was officially announced, hitting 13,000 tweets per minute. During the 90-minute presentation, tweet volume was sustained well above 4,000 tpm. That’s pretty huge, if you’re wondering.

The most retweeted tweets were typically sarcastic comments about the new phone or detailed updates from the event. Here are the top two tweets in terms of retweets (with 845 and 786 retweets, respectively).

Overall, the accounts that generated the most exposure were news and media accounts live-tweeting the event and sharing updates from the presentation, including @mashable, @TIME, and @nytimes.

Finally, here’s overall tweet activity for the entire day of October 4. 148,205 tweets were posted during the first hour (10:00 a.m. PDT) of the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event. 

Recently, TweetReach customer Exposed PR, along with C&I Studios, ran a very creative promotion with their client IKEA. We love to highlight interesting – and successful – PR campaigns, so read on for more about this cool promotion.

In July, Exposed PR and C&I Studios teamed up with IKEA to organize an in-store scavenger hunt with an online twist. Called Capture the Catalog, this promotion pitted 11 teams against each other in a scavenger hunt at the IKEA store in Sunrise, Florida, just outside Fort Lauderdale. Teams competed to complete a set of tasks in the store, and tweeted about their achievements as they went, trying to get as many retweets as possible. The teams were competing to see who could generate the most impressions on Twitter in 90 minutes. Exposed PR used TweetReach to track these tweets and measure each team’s impressions. They generated more than 8 million impressions in just an hour and half, reaching more than 700,000 unique Twitter accounts!

We talked to Sara Shake of Exposed PR, one of the creators of this promotion, to understand more about where this clever idea came from and how everything went.

First, tell us a little about the IKEA Capture the Catalog Tournament. What was the goal of this promotion?

The goal of the Ikea promotion was to launch their 2012 Catalog. As a company, Ikea has a few different times throughout the year that are extremely important, and their catalog launch is the biggest. We wanted a creative way to get the word out that didn’t include the typical Media Day festivities that they had done in the past.

How did you come up with the idea for this promotion?

I share my office with a company called C&I Studios. It’s not unusual for us at the end of the day to start speaking in terms of “What If.” Once we’ve completed all the work for the day, we always try to spend sometime just brainstorming without the limitations of the clients that we currently service. We don’t think about location or budget, we just bounce ideas until something sticks. We call these ideas our 5 O’Clock Miracles.

This idea came largely from my frequent frustration with traditional media… We (Joshua Miller from C&I Studios and I) thought there has to be a better way to get the word out, without the help of traditional media. Then we thought about how competition drives people. The original concept was Capture the Flag (which is where Capture the Catalog came from), but it evolved into a scavenger hunt. We knew we needed a forward-thinking brand to latch onto the idea…and this was just about the time that you started hearing about Ikea letting the cats loose in Sweden. We said “We need a brand like Ikea!” We were lucky enough to have one in the neighborhood, so we just called.

How did you decide who won?

The first-place winner was the team with the highest number of impressions of their unique hash tag during the 90-minute scavenger hunt.

What role did TweetReach play in this promotion?

TweetReach was instrumental in the Capture the Catalog tournament. We were able to set up a Tracker to live-track every team’s (there were 11) hashtag throughout the tournament. This way we were able to make announcements like, “So and so is in the lead with 350,000 impressions.” We also announced every time that we reached another million impressions of the combined hashtags. We took snapshot reports for each hashtag at the end of the tournament and that’s how we determined the winner.

What would you change for next time?

We would just find a way to make it bigger and better.

What went well? Was there anything you were particularly proud of?

We were really proud of the teams; they went all out. It was also an amazing experience to work with Ikea as a brand. They believed and bought into the vision, and took it to an entirely different level. From the graphics and signage they produced, to the staff that manned each clue, to the prize that they provided to our winners, it was totally refreshing to work with a brand that didn’t cut a single corner. They were exceptionally thoughtful down to the last detail.

What did IKEA think?

They loved it! In a Miami Herald article about the event, Chantal Nichtawitz, marking manager at Ikea Sunrise, said, “We were certain that the event drove traffic to the store. That Saturday we had one of the biggest Saturdays we’ve seen in over a calendar year.”

Do you have any recommendations or tips for someone running their own promotion or contest on Twitter?

The key is finding the right brand and participants.

You can follow Exposed PR, C&I Studios, and the IKEA Sunrise store on Twitter.

We worked with ESPN to measure Twitter’s reaction to this year’s X Games 17, held in Los Angeles, California from July 28-31, 2011. Hundreds of athletes from 17 countries competed in sports like skateboarding, motocross, BMX and rally car racing. And over the four days of the X Games, 97,200 people tweeted 188,813 times, generating an impressive reach of 37.7 million*.

How’d they do it?

“Our goal going in was to make the event as social as possible,” says Mick Kelleher, Associate Manager of Multimedia Content Strategy for the X Games. This was a big, integrated effort combining all the ESPN teams responsible for producing the X Games. The TV production team showed the #xgames hashtag frequently during the telecast, included athlete Twitter accounts in on-screen bios as well as showing athlete tweets on air. The social team used the @XGames Twitter account to keep their followers on Twitter up to date on all the events. The social integration even went all the way to the event site, where they encouraged fans attending the Games to tweet.

The results

ESPN used TweetReach Pro Trackers to comprehensively track and analyze all mentions of the X Games on Twitter for the week leading up to the event and during the event itself. As you can see below, the strong results of their social strategy speak for themselves.

The most retweeted tweet about the games was from @LilTunechi, which received 905 retweets and generated more than 3 million impressions.

One of the biggest stories to come out of this year’s X Games concerned Travis Pastrana, who broke his ankle and leg in the Moto X Best Trick competition on Thursday, but later competed – and placed fourth – in the RallyCross final on Sunday.

We analyzed tweets about several events in detail, including Moto X Best Trick, Skateboarding Big Air, BMX Park Freestyle, Rally Car Racing, Skateboard Street, and RallyCross. At one point during the RallyCross final, viewers noticed something strange; 200 people tweeted that they spotted The Stig from Top Gear walk behind Brian Deegan during an interview. Here are the big moments from one our favorite X Games 17 days. Click the image for the full size version.

Congrats to all the athletes who competed this year! Thank you for an exciting and action-packed four days at X Games 17.

*Read this for more on how we calculate reach and other metrics. And, are you interested in this kind of analysis for your media event? Let’s talk.

President Obama held his first-ever Twitter Townhall today. For several days, White House staffers have been collecting questions from the public on Twitter. Anyone could contribute a question for the President by just adding the #AskObama hashtag to a tweet.

We followed all the #AskObama tweets during today’s Q&A session. During the hour-long event, we tracked 64,789 tweets from 29,772 contributors with a reach of 35 million. There were more than 161K total tweets posted yesterday with a daily overall reach of 49.5 million. Here’s a word cloud of those tweets (thanks, Wordle!).

We wanted to understand just how many tweets were posted about some of those topics. Nearly a quarter of all questions were related to jobs and unemployment, about 18% related to the economy, 10% about taxes, and 5% about education. Of course, not all questions were about serious topics like jobs and the economy. More than 100 people asked if the president prefers boxers or briefs, and 200 asked the president to bring back Arrested Development (or to hurry the movie along). And there were more than 1,000 retweets of the Nyan Cat.

Finally, here are a few of our favorite less-than-serious questions. We’re still wondering about the answer to the third question ourselves. And of course we all know the answer to that last one.

Yesterday, we tracked 253,321 tweets from 160,458 Twitterers about Oprah Winfrey’s final episode of The Oprah Show. The tweets have been pouring in all week. We, along with Resource Interactive, have monitored more than 600,000 tweets about Oprah and her show this week alone. Dozens of celebrities tweeted their congratulations and opinions on Oprah’s last show, including @TheEllenShow, @ricky_martin, @MariahCarey, @RevRunWisdom, @aplusk, @DENISE_RICHARDS, @Alyssa_Milano, @michaelianblack, @kevin_nealon, @kathygriffin, and @AnnCurry.

The Oprah Show aired for most markets at 4:00 p.m. local time. During the 4:00 p.m. hour in EDT, tweets spiked up to 2,500 tweets per minute during the final moments of the show. That’s a sizable spike, but compared to the 2011 Academy Awards (11,780 tpm) or even the Chrysler ‘Imported From Detroit’ Super Bowl commercial (2,816 tpm), it’s not even close to the highest spike we’ve seen for a television event (of course The Oprah Show wasn’t aired live in all markets at the same time, so these aren’t completely equal comparisons).

A few more tidbits from the data:

• 4,511 tweets including references to tears
• 8,001 tweets mentioned crying
• 5,183 tweets referred to feeling sad
• 12 tweets used the phrase “my life is over”

But not everyone was unhappy to see the show end. Many of the most-retweeted tweets were sarcastic remarks or jokes about The Oprah Show. For example, these tweets from @funnyordie (via @robhuebel) and @DamonLindelof received 1,068 and 677 retweets, respectively.

Oprah’s main demographic is women over 35, which isn’t really Twitter’s main demographic. So some of the most popular tweets about Oprah yesterday, like the two above, had nothing to do with the content of the show. But other popular tweets were quotes from the show itself, like these:

Oprah gave out her personal email address – oprah@oprah.com – on air and 1,179 people tweeted about it. She’s probably going to get a lot of emails. Good thing she has the time to read all those now. Just don’t accidentally email Opera.

The TweetReach team attended the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas this week. SXSWi is a great big gathering of all kinds of interactive professionals – from social media folks to software developers and startup founders, to designers, researchers and basically anyone interested in the digital space. This year’s SXSWi conference attracted 19,364 attendees (nearly a 36% increase from 2010).

During the conference, we monitored tweets that mentioned SXSW. During the five days of the interactive conference, we tracked:

• 626,513 tweets from
• 172,432 contributors with a
• reach of 56,868,452 that generated
• 2.2 billion impressions.

The most retweeted tweet during the conference was from @SteveCase and received 1,523 retweets.

We’re still crunching the rest of the numbers, so we’ll have more in-depth analysis of SXSWi tweets and what people were talking about very soon. Stay tuned.

We tracked more than a million tweets during this year’s Oscars telecast (along with partner Mass Relevance). So what did Twitter think of the show? Here’s our analysis of key moments and tweets from the show. Click here to view the full size version of this infographic.

Twitter got pretty excited when:

• Melissa Leo dropped the f-bomb during her Best Supporting Actress speech
• Toy Story 3 won Best Animated Feature
• Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won Best Original Score for The Social Network
• The cast of Harry Potter, Twilight and other films were autotuned
• Oprah announced the Best Documentary Feature award (and when Banksy didn’t win for Exit Through the Gift Shop)
• Natalie Portman won the Best Actress Oscar
• The King’s Speech won for Best Picture

Other spikes were when:

• Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake presented the animated awards
• James Franco dressed as Marilyn Monroe
• Christian Bale won Best Supporting Actor
• Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi’s performed the Oscar-nominated song from Tangled
• Colin Firth won the Best Actor Oscar
• PS22 sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow

By the way, our predictions for the big three Oscars were correct! As we dig more into the data over the next few days, we’ll be posting additional Academy Award tweet analysis here.