The world has turned to social media to share tragic and distressing news from around the world, and the plight of a global epidemic around war-ridden countries has transformed itself into a viral hashtag, #RefugeesWelcome. Another powerful example of how the global force driving social media conversations is using these public social platforms beyond connection and information-sharing, but as a forum to encourage governmental change and public awareness.
This week in our post, we focus on lighter fare news ahead of a long holiday weekend, including the massive attention Twitter gave to this year's MTV VMAs, the social reaction to Obama's pending reality TV debut, Brady's overturned #DeflateGate ruling and more.
VMAs set Twitter on fire
By now we all know that the VMAs accumulated tens-of-millions of tweets, and depending on the timeframe in which you're looking at the VMA conversation, it can vary in size dramatically. The conversation's size is newsworthy, but examining what people were actually saying is important too.
The number of musical performances is a staple that the VMAs hang their hat on. When we look at the conversation around all musical guests it's clear that Justin Bieber dominated the conversation. Bieber accounts for 55% of all performance-related tweets. Second and third place belong to Nicki Minaj with 16%, and Demi Lovato with 11%, respectively.
Volume is a nice, stand-alone metric, but when combined with sentiment it paints a more accurate picture. While Bieber had the largest volume of mentions, he also had an overwhelmingly positive sentiment. Bieber's sentiment was over 97% positive within Brandwatch sentiment-recognized tweets. Nicki Minaj, had a positive conversation, but not as positive as Bieber, as her sentiment was only 60% positive.
Most performances were well-received, with Macklemore and Ryan Lewis receiving a conversation sentiment split almost exactly down the middle at 50%.
Celebrities are another staple of the VMAs, and there were five who stole the show. The below chart shows who received the most Twitter mentions overall.
The program's host, Miley Cyrus, received the most mentions unsurprisingly, followed by Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and Kanye West.
Kanye, however, boasted the highest peak of mentions within the timeframe of the actual awards show during his Vanguard acceptance speech.
Again, when we examine each celeb's sentiment, we can see Bieber has a very positive conversation, while Miley Cyrus' is slightly negative. Kanye West's sentiment is very close to 50/50, staying true to his "love him, or hate him" persona.
When you look at the mentions of the VMA's notable awards, it is very clear that people talked about the Artist to Watch award most. This one award accounted for 44% of all award Twitter mentions.
A large contributor the the Artist to Watch dominance on Twitter is the fact that fans could use Twitter to vote for who they wanted to win the award. As you can see, Video of the Year came in second place with 16% of the awards discussion.
Idris Elba Would Make a Terrific 007, Just Ask the Internet
Daniel Craig has said that the latest Bond movie might very well be his last. This leaves a bunch of room for speculation as to who will play the iconic spy next, and Idris Elba's name has been top-of-mind.
It came out this week that a Bond author wasn't a fan of Elba being cast for the role. Big mistake. People took to Twitter to react and generated a conversation with more than 164K mentions.
You can see the main themes of the entire conversation below.
With such a beloved character, and such a large conversation, it's easy to believe that this conversation certainly encompassed the global. Specifically, the United States and the United Kingdom.
How Twitter reacts to Obama's scheduled appearance on reality TV
President Obama is going to run wild on Running Wild with everyone's favorite survivalist, Bear Grylls. The announcement broke earlier this week, and people ran to social media to talk about the show's first presidential guest.
Accumulating around 41K mentions, people remembered all the show's moments that other guests endured in extreme survival scenarios.
While the President's appearance will certainly be entertaining, he is also hoping that people will think more deeply about climate change. It may already be working as 'climate change' and #ClimateChange appear in this conversation's main topics and hashtags.
#ClimateChange accumulated more than 2 million impressions, and it's clear that Washington, DC and Obama's home state of Illinois contributed largely to this conversation.
#FreeBrady defeats #DeflateGate
Tom Brady's Twitter mentions exploded as the news of his overturned suspension broke. This entire conversation has already accumulated around 360K mentions on Twitter. This news has caused the Twitter conversation around Tom Brady to increase by 50 times in volume.
The sentiment within this conversation is overwhelmingly positive, as positive tweets outnumber negative tweets at a rate of 2-to-1 with sentiment-categorized mentions.
The top hashtags around this breaking news can be seen below with #Deflategate leading the way, accruing over 742 million impressions.
Men are dominating the conversation as they have contributed 79% of all unique tweets.
September speeds up 2015
Whether we like it or not, the fall frenzy in the business and news world has come early, prior to the Labor Day holiday weekend. With droves of data in the social media realm, the world's top serious news stories, trends, campaigns and funny moments are in full fledged busy mode.
We'll be closely scouring the social data seas to report back insights driven by social intelligence.
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