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GSL Trending on Twitter: Stats and case study on how Twitter Trending works

Simon Sundén — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:46:19 +0000

In the social media industry there’s always a lot of talk about Twitter Trending and many companies and organisation try very hard to get trending on Twitter.

I always get the question “Hey, how do we get trending on Twitter” and that’s probably because I’m one of the Co-Founders of Lissly, which is a company where we have a monitoring tool and we help customers with their Social Media Monitoring & Analyzing.

As many of my friends know I love StarCraft2 and this morning it was the final of Global StarCraft League November, the most prestigious tournament in the world when it comes to StarCraft2.

This final was so popular that it got trending topic on Twitter, so with my love for this game + my love for Social Media Analytics, why not publish some stats about this Grand Final of this event?

GSL Twitter data during 3/12 2011

This is the the amount of mentions for #GSL for every hour (CET time-zone). As you can see there were a LOT of mentions about #GSL just when it started but not that many before the start of the tournament.

The amazing thing is that between 09-12 CET there were 4 526 tweets (!) about the GSL!

With over 1300 tweets in an hour GSL became the trending topic worldwide on Twitter. This is the first time #GSL have trended on Twitter in 2011 and it’s mainly because of the % increase in tweets.

Common words & Top Mentioners about the GSL Finals

I also analyzed what the most common related words in the tweets about GSL November and the most active tweeters.

As you can see @Artosis was a popular related word. This is mainly because a lot of people ReTweeted his tweet about the GSL Final.

Another thing that is pretty clear is that Leenock were more talked about than Jjajki during the final. It is pretty clear that people thought the final was fantastic. With words like amazing, awesome, best it’s obvious that the ones tweeted thought that this was the best GSL final yet.

Statistics for Leenock vs Jjakji

The two players in the Global StarCraft league finals were Leenock and Jjakji. In the graph below you can see how many tweets each player got on Twitter:

People talked a lot more about Leenock than Jjakji during the final and he was the clear fan favorite.

* Every combination of misspelling for jjakji and Leenock are included.

Tasteless & Artosis made us do it!

For those who do not know, Nick “Tasteless” Plott & Dan “Artosis” Stemkoski are commentators of StarCraft2 and have done this for many years. The commentating nerd-life partners casted the Global StarCraft league finals and people support and love these guys.

Tasteless very often says that you should go to Twitter and “hashtag #GSL and spread the word about eSports. We want to make this trending, guys!”.

And the people wathching these games actually did this! When Tasteless in Game 6 of the GSL Final said “Hashtag GSL”, there were 60 tweets with the hashtag #GSL in 10 seconds!

Because how the Twitter Trending algorithm work this does not always work, but this time it was different – it was a great final and with most of US sleeping #GSL got trending – mostly thanks to Tasteless and Artosis.

So, how the f*ck did GSL trend on Twitter – how does Twitter Trending work?

This is a very important case study because there are a lot of misconceptions regarding Twitter Trending. Many believe that it’s based on pure popularity but that’s not true.

Twitter Trending is, just as the the name says, based on how much a keyword or phrase increase in a very short amount of period and how many people tweet about it. You can basically call this the “Bieber algorithm” – because otherwise Justin Bieber would be trending all the time.

This is also the reason why you never see a hashtag trending on the last day of a big event or tournament. The increase in % on the last day for a event like DreamHack or MLG can never increase that much to become trending.

The regular amount of posts about these tournaments are too high and will make it much harder to get trending. This is the reason why HuK became trending topic worldwide during DreamHack Summer as well as Leenock during MLG.

This helped GSL a lot today to get trending. The amount of tweets for GSL yesterday were very low and not a lot of people talked about it as you can see in the graph below:

If people would have talked a lot about GSL before the final – or if it happened to be a match yesterday they would never get trending.

What can we learn about this?

Never underestimate the power of an influental person. When Tasteless & Artosis says you should hashtag #GSL – people get to the computer and actually do it.
Other communities helps a lot. People during this final followed the final and discussed it on Reddit and TeamLiquid – together these people also tweeted like crazy.
Big conferences and events should learn more about how this actually works – maybe even have a special tag for the final day/event?

If you have any more questions or want more data you can always comment and I will try to update this post as soon as possible.

+ If you want more Social Media data we have some awesome data from DreamHack Winter 2011 that we will publish very soon!

Twitter Search Growth 2009: +586%

Scandinavian Vikings Love Facebook

Simon Sundén — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:35:07 +0000

You might have heard a lot from your fellow Scandinavian friends lately. You know, we tend to win a lot of golds in the Olympics when it comes to Cross-Country Skiing and other winter sports. But we do not only kick your ass in hockey and skiing, we also kick your ass when it comes to Facebook usage!

I have recently studied statistics from Facebook when it comes to demographics and growth. I’ll publish the whole thing on monday on my Swedish blog but in the meantime it’s interesting to look at some statistics for Scandinavia and the Nordic countries.

40% of Scandinavia have Facebook

If you compare Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark) with the rest of the world we have a lot more users in % of population than the most of the countries in the world.

If we compare the Facebook data with official population statistics we see that almost 40% of every living person in Scandinavia have Facebook. This includes every living person, even the just born child and the 102 year old grandmother.

Sweden like Facebook

Sweden is the largest country in Scandinavia both when it comes to Area & Population (9,3 Million). I will publish more data about Sweden on Monday when it comes to demographics and growth. Stay tuned for more info .

Denmark are crazy Facebook lovers

Denmark is one of the top countries in the world when it comes to Facebook population with only fellow neighbours Norway and Iceland beating them.

Norway have the most Facebook users in Scandinavia

Our neighbours Norway was one of the first countries that embraced Facebook early. During the most part of 2007 Norway actually had more Facebook users than Sweden which is quite impressive.

Finland have their saunas

Finland is the only dissapointment within the Nordic countries when it comes to Facebook. I don’t exactly know why but it seems like they are more interested with saunas than Facebook when you compare them with other Nordic countries.

Iceland is the #1 Facebook country in the world

Iceland is the only country within the Nordic countries where over 50% of the population have Facebook..

There you have the data for Viking-land! As you might have guessed I love pie charts and statistics. Always fun to look at a Friday like this, and especially when it comes to Scandinavian Vikings.

* All data are based on Facebooks own data and local population data from SCB, SSB etc.

Scandinavian Vikings Love Facebook is a post from: Late Night Marketing

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Twitter Search Growth 2009: +586%

Simon Sundén — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:18:58 +0000

There have been a lot of talk about that Twitter doesn’t grow that much anymore and that we are seeing the end of the hype behind Twitter. I think this is wrong in so many ways and there is one thing that you can look at that shows that Twitter is growing and that is Twitter Search.

During 2009 Twitter Search has become the natural place when it comes to real time search, especially during live events like Michael Jackson death, Iran election etc.

Search + Integrated Search = Twitter Search

One problem many people do when they try do analyze Twitter Search is that they only look at search.twitter.com which is a big mistake. In July 2009 Twitter launched their new site and there you could see something quite interesting. They focus with a big search box and every search made through the homepage are done on integratedsearch.twitter.com.

Many people just look at search.twitter.com and the they see that the traffic didn’t increase that much during the last couple of months.

Twitter growth 2009

To solve this problem I’ve added upp both search.twitter.com & integratedsearch.twitter.com to see how the growth has been during 2009. The data below is from the fantastic Compete.com where you can find good data for U.S.

As you can see in the graph the growth of Twitter Search have been quite amazing in the US during 2009. From December 2008 to December 2009 the growth is 457%. Twitter Search was launched during 2008 so we can only see data from July 2008 and forward, therefore you can’t compare whole 2009 with 2008 but…

If you compare Q4 2009 with Q4 2008 it’s a 586% increase in traffic.

It’s not fair at this point to compare the traffic with big competitors like Bing, Google or Yahoo Search but you can indeed compare it with niched search engines like Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Yahoo Images etc.

Here you can see the interesting regarding Twitter Search growth. In comparison with these Twitter Search has grown and today Twitter Search has 4 times as many visitors than Google Blogsearch.

Twitter Search may not be the largest engine right now, but if it continues to grow like it did during 2009 it will become an engine that marketers need to focus on.

Twitter Search Growth 2009: +586% is a post from: Late Night Marketing