TweetReach Blog

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.

During this year’s Super Bowl, we monitored Twitter conversation about the 26 major brands advertising during the game. From those tweets we compiled an in-depth report on Super Bowl XLV advertising. Below is a summary of that report.

The full 62-page report is based on 374,987 tweets about 26 brands and 47 commercials. The report includes brand by brand comparisons, metrics such as tweet volume, impressions and share of voice, as well as detailed discussion of successful advertising strategies. You can purchase the full Super Bowl tweet analysis report here.

Super Bowl Twitter Analysis Summary

As always, this year’s Super Bowl ads generated lots of conversation. We posted an analysis of overall Super Bowl ad winners based on tweets, but we wanted to have a more in-depth discussion here about some of the individual ads.

One of the most-buzzed about Super Bowl ads was the Groupon Tibet ad. Many people are discussing this ad, debating whether it was offensive or hilarious. No matter what you think of it, the Groupon Super Bowl ad got people talking.

But for us, the big Super Bowl ad surprise was the Chrysler Imported from Detroit commercial. Not only was this one of our personal favorites of the night, but it seemed to be Twitter’s favorite, too. We tracked more than 38,000 tweets about this ad during the game, making it the most-tweeted about ad of Super Bowl XLV, even beating out those Doritos and Bud Light commercials. In the minute immediately following the ad, conversation about Chrysler peaked at 2,816 tweets in a single minute.

As soon as the game was over, I asked around about what people thought about the ads. Overwhelmingly, people loved the Chrysler ad. Here are a few of their thoughts:

As a former Detroiter and someone who has much love for the city (hopes to end up there one day again), and has made no secret about her love for Eminem, that Eminem/Chrysler ad just made the “Superbowl commercials” for me. I felt it – it made the hair on my arms stand up – you know he loves the city. It just reminded me of the spirit and heart in that city! -Maegan S.

I have to say overall American Car companies stepped up their advertising. Fewer Midwestern guys in trucks and more “stuff I’d like to buy”. -DJ S.

The Detroit commercial was amazing – such a wonderful depiction of the city. -Kelly R.

We also generated a word cloud from tweets about the ad. We removed the words related directly to the commercial (Chrysler, Detroit, Eminem, Super Bowl, and so on) to surface people’s opinions of the ad. As you can see, the overall opinion of this ad was very positive.

The Chrysler word cloud speaks even more loudly when compared to the Groupon commercial’s word cloud. Take a look:

Tweets about Chrysler often included words such as like, great, love, good, awesome, nice, and want, while tweets about Groupon often included words such as offensive, bad, fail, taste, and kenneth (in reference to a recent controversial tweet from fashion designer Kenneth Cole). And maybe this is a case of any publicity is good publicity for Groupon, as the ad has certainly caused quite a stir. The Groupon ad is steeped in humor and irony; CEO Andrew Mason claims the commercial was intended to make fun of themselves at Groupon. But Chrysler’s ad was far less ironic; it seemed to take itself and the audience seriously. Maybe this is why people responded so positively. The Detroit ad certainly stood out from the other commercials shown before and after it, both in terms of the commercial itself and the tweets about it.

Stay tuned, as we’ve got lots more analysis of the Super Bowl tweet data coming up later this week.

A 30-second commercial in this year’s Super Bowl – Super Bowl XLV – cost each advertiser approximately $3 million. $3 million is a lot of money to spend for 30 seconds of TV air time; that’s about $100,000 a second. But one of the reasons big brands are willing to spend that kind of cash on an ad is that the ads live on through the web and social media, well beyond the 30 seconds they appear on television. Many brands even released their ads early, posting them on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter last week. And lots of these advertisers have coordinated social media campaigns around the Super Bowl, extending their reach well beyond the TV. So that $3 million could end up having a huge impact.

This weekend, we worked with Resource Interactive to monitor tweets about the brands advertising during Super Bowl XLV so we could understand which ads and which brands generated the most conversation on Twitter. We tracked Twitter mentions of the 30+ major Super Bowl advertisers, measuring tweet volume and overall impressions generated for these brands during the game. Tim Wilson has written an excellent post about his analysis at Resource.

We ranked the top-performing advertisers by overall tweet volume generated during the Super Bowl. Some of these brands ran one ad (Chrysler), while others ran multiple ads (Doritos). The winners for total brand mentions* are:

1. Doritos – 56,000+ tweets

2. Chrysler – 39,000+ tweets

3. Pepsi – 32,000+ tweets

4(tie). Best Buy – 26,000+ tweets

4(tie). Volkswagen – 26,000+ tweets

6. Anheuser-Busch – 25,000+ tweets

7. Groupon – 22,000+ tweets

8. GoDaddy.com – 19,000+ tweets

9. Chevrolet – 18,000+ tweets

10. Audi – 14,000+ tweets

And, the part you’ve all been waiting for – the most-tweeted about individual commercials. There are a few surprises in this list. No Budweiser ads in the top ten, newcomer Groupon makes an aggressive appearance, and the top ad generated nearly twice as many tweets as its next closest competitor. So, here’s the list of the top Super Bowl XLV ads by tweet volume:

1. Chrysler: Imported from Detroit

2. Doritos: House Sitting

3. Doritos: The Best Part

4. “Captain America” Movie Trailer

5. “Thor” Movie Trailer

6. “Transformers” Movie Trailer

7. Best Buy with Bieber and Ozzy

8. Pepsi Max: First Date

9. Skechers

10. Pepsi Max: Love Hurts

11. Audi: Release the Hounds

12. Snickers: Logging

13. Groupon: Tibet

Since there were three movie trailers in the top ten, we decided to list the top 13 commercials, just in case you don’t count trailers as true commercials.

We’re going to be digging into these data for further in-depth analysis over the next few days, so check back for more.

*Due to high tweet volumes about these ads during the Super Bowl, Twitter at times imposed some collection rate limits, which means that these counts include between 70% and 90% of all possible tweets. The numbers above can be interpreted directionally, just know that they are slightly lower than the true number of tweets for each brand.

On Sunday, January 16, 2011, we tracked tweets containing #goldenglobes and it told us a lot about how users watch TV together on Twitter. We thought we’d make it into a nice infographic. Click here to view the full size version of our 2011 Golden Globes infographic.

For months – even years – people have been speculating about when the iPhone would be available on Verizon. Today, we finally learned that the Verizon iPhone will officially go on sale in February.

We’ve been tracking tweets about the Verizon iPhone for a while. And it just so happens that we also tracked tweets about CES. So, how do these two events compare? Did the Verizon iPhone announcement really overshadow CES, at least as far as the tweets are concerned? Let’s see.

Here’s the tweet volume for January 11 (times displayed in PST):

Verizon iPhone tweets peaked at more than 56,000 in one hour. As a comparison, the highest number of tweets per hour about CES was 9,641. In one week, 136 thousand people tweeted 443 thousand times about CES. In less than one day, 114 thousand people tweeted 199 thousand times about the Verizon iPhone. Tweets about CES reached 42 million people in a week; tweets about Verizon iPhone reached 33 million people in a day.

Over the past few weeks, speculation about the Verizon iPhone really heated up. Many people thought the announcement would come at this year’s CES event. Others joked that Apple, who didn’t attend CES, was intentionally waiting to announce the partnership, in order to overshadow CES. And then last Friday, January 7, we learned of a Verizon press event scheduled for Tuesday, January 11, just two days after CES ended. The Wall Street Journal confirmed that the Verizon Apple partnership would be announced at this event. People got very excited. On that day alone, our TweetReach Tracker monitored more than 45,000 tweets about the Verizon iPhone, with a reach of 19.3 million unique Twitter accounts.

Given how many anticipatory tweets we tracked, we were very excited to see the tweets on the actual day of the official announcement from Verizon. The announcement was scheduled for 11 a.m. ET/8:00 a.m. PT on January 11, 2011. During the announcement hour, tweets about the Verizon iPhone spiked, as people posted updates from the announcement and their opinions on the news. In just that one hour, we tracked 56,303 tweets from 39,275 different users, reaching 21,576,495 unique Twitter accounts.

What this tells us is that Apple can basically do in one day what 2,700 other tech companies did in an entire week at CES. No wonder Apple is the world’s second most valuable company.