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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%

You thought blogging was dead? In Sweden it’s still the king!

Simon Sundén — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:22:44 +0000

There have been a lot of talk lately about blogging and that Social Networks and platforms like Twitter are killing the blogging.

In some extent this is true, but more in the way that blogging itself is changing and we use other platforms for it.

But blogging is not dead. Here in Sweden we have one of the most active blogospheres in the world and we are still bat-shit crazy when it comes to blogging.

Let me just simply show this by taking Swedish TV show Idol as an example, which currently is the most popular TV show in Sweden.

I have analyzed how many people mention Idol during the day of the weekly finals of the show and this last friday I found something very interesting. With Lissly I checked which kind of social media that mentions Idol the most:

In detail there are two interesting things here for 11th november Friday:

1317 tweets
1123 blog posts (!)

The amount of blog posts this day was really crazy – especially compared to Twitter. Twitter is starting to grow in Sweden but if you look at it compared to blogging it’s still very small in Sweden.

To write a blog post takes a lot more time from the user than a simple tweet and the content and effort for these blog post can’t really be compared to Facebook or Twitter – that’s why this is so impressive.

During the Idol finals there were 228 blog posts from 20.00-21.00! People simply talked about the Idol weekly final, what they did and what they thought about at the same time they were watching it.

1123 blog post does not seem so much in a country like USA but you have to remember that Sweden is a small country with 9.3M people – that’s what makes it so amazing.

So when you hear someone say that blogging is dead and you should totally switch your focus to Twitter & Facebook tell them to think again: In Sweden blogging still kicks ass!

You thought blogging was dead? In Sweden it’s still the king! is a post from: Late Night Marketing

Scandinavian Vikings Love Facebook

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

10 Search Predictions for 2010

Simon Sundén — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:35:48 +0000

Today I saw the video from Matt Cutts regarding 2010 Search Predictions and as always it’s good to know what comes out from the Google Plex. I don’t know if there were any good predictions in the video but I do agree with him regarding the problem with illegal Black Hat stuff.

But to get serious – there must be some other predictions regarding search than hacking, malware in 2010, right? Of course there are! Some weeks ago I wrote an article about trends within Search in Swedish. It was before I started this blog so now I’ve taken the time now to translate it into English so you won’t have to use Google Translate all the time.

Some of the predictions in the original article are completely based on Search in Sweden, and it’s quite differenent internationally. Therefore some predictions have been taken away and some have been modified.

So here comes this weeks list: 10 Search Predictions for 2010 that not have gone through Googles filter:

1. Dude, Where’s My SERP?

The classic, organic search results that we all now will be much harder to find. With real time search, Personalized search, images, blogs, news, local and other kind of results that Google, Bing and the others provide it will come to a point where we ask ourselves the question: Dude, where’s my SERP?

2. Twitter will become a real player within search

2010 will be the year that Twitter will become really good regarding real time search. They’ve already said that they will put relevancy, links and authority into consideration when they present search result and I do believe them. Of course they will compete with Bing/Google because of the fact that they now include tweets. But the natural place to search when it comes to real time events will still be Twitter in 2010.

3. It’s a Bing, Bing World!

2010 will be the year that Bing will rise and for some people it will become a more fresh alternative to Google when it comes to search. I think that Bing will have a market share of 15-20% in the US at the same time that Yahoo will keep their position. For the first time in a long time we will see that Googles market share will decline when it comes to search.

4. Paid Tweets is the new Paid Links

I like to call this “Pay Per Tweet”, PPT, just because it makes PowerPoint nerds scratch their heads in confusion when I write about it.

Nontheless, Pay Per Tweet will become an effective tactic when it comes to search. The rise of real time results will make the use of tweets and status updates more efficient when it comes to ranking.

The big question here will of course be: Shall search engines follow Paid Tweets? Yep you are perfectly right: Paid Tweets is the new Paid Links.

5. Bye bye nofollow!

Google have launched their own URL shortener (goo.gl) so for me it’s quite clear that it is time to not listened to what Google says regarding “nofollow” anymore. Google wants us to believe that they do not follow links with rel=”nofollow”, but I don’t trust them on this issue.

Ask yourself this question: If you get 1 000 ReTweets on a tweet with a fantastic link – don’t you believe that the search engines will take this into consideration?

6. SEO-investments will increase

There will be a lot more investments in SEO in 2010. Maybe not that classical SEO companies will increase their revenue with 100% but rather that more agencies will sell SEO services. Especially in Europe we will see more web agencys, adertising agencies & PR agencies offering SEO services.

7. Your mobile is your best search friend

With services like Visual Search (Google Googles) and other smart implementations there will be a huge challenge for SEO 2010 to optimize for mobile search. You have no idea how many 16-20 year old girls in Sweden that wished for a iPhone as christmas gift and got it from their nice father, just to make her lovely daughter happy. SEMPO has already written about this and it will become even more important in 2010.

The big question is: How to we target a iPhone/Android-user that use the mobile for search?

8. Real Time Spam

I’ve written about this earlier that spam will yet again be a huge problem for search engines. This time it will come in the form of Twitter spam, Facebook spam, blog spam and other things to target the real time results. There will be a huge debate about this in 2010 just because Google and the other engines have opened up a big can of spam that a lot of Viagra sites will use.

My hope is of course that the search engines will manage to fix this pretty fast and that we in the end of 2010 can look back and see that it was just in the beginning of 2010 spam was a huge problem.

9. Facebook release an upgraded search engine

Facebook is huge in Europe and in the Scandinavian countries over 40% of the population have Facebook. That’s a lot! When a lot of people have Facebook they will start searching on Facebook if they provide with good search results. Approximately 90-95% of all girls between 18-23 in Sweden have Facebook, just to give you a hint. The real question to ask yourself is this: Why do I have to go to Google when I can search on Facebook?

This is something Facebook knows and that’s the reason why they develop their search quite a lot. Facebook will be better at this 2010 and we will start talking about Facebook as a search engine, not only a social network.

10. Personalized Search is here to stay

Many SEO:s love to just not think about personalized search and tell that it doesn’t matter that much. I think that this is a huge mistake and that personalized search will grow a lot in 2010. We have just seen the beginning of it yet and therefore the search results will not be that different, but be so sure that Google will tweak this more during 2010.

There you have my predicitons for this year. Will I be right on my predictions? Maybe, maybe not – only time will tell…

10 Search Predictions for 2010 is a post from: Late Night Marketing