Friday, January 07, 2011
Celeb Tweets Influence Big News Stories in 2010
From Northwestern University
Celebrities on Twitter influencing the biggest news stories of the year? Not that much of a surprise, when you consider the rapid rise in popularity of the micro-blogging, 140-characters at-a-time messages over the past two years.
When it comes to controversial topics or heart-wrenching natural disasters, celebrities on Twitter, with hundreds of thousands of followers, have an obvious platform to spread information and generate public interest.
Professor Alok Choudhary examined the influence of celebrity Tweeters and created the website www.pulseofthetweeters.com, which analyzes data from Twitter in realtime. Choudhary is the John G. Searle Professor and chair of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Here are some more insights into the top influencers and sentiments that Choudhary’s team discovered when they analyzed the biggest trends on Twitter in 2010:
* People: Lady Gaga, Mel Gibson and Justin Bieber were among the most tweeted about people in 2010, but no individual tweeter emerged as the most influential in this category when tweeting about these people. Sentiments for Lady Gaga and Bieber were more than 75 percent positive. Sentiments for the topic of Gibson were more than 65 percent negative.
* News events: NPR News, The New York Times, Time.com, CNN and The Wall Street Journal were often top 10 influencers on topics related to politics and world affairs.
* Television: E! Online was consistently the top- or second-ranked influencer on the topic of award shows such as the Grammys, the American Music Awards and MTV award shows. There was no top common influencer for all other top-trending tweeted TV shows such as “Glee,” “The Family Guy” and “CSI.” Justin Bieber was the top-most influencer for “CSI,” but the top trending topic was actually about Bieber’s acting role in one CSI episode.
* Sports: Lebron James, Brett Favre, Michael Vick, Wimbledon and Manchester United were among the top sports topics in 2010. There were no clear common top influencers for these topics because they are very heavily dependent on the specifics of a particular topic rather than the category of sports, Choudhary said. Comedian Stephen Colbert, however, was the top influencer for the topic of Brett Favre. Wimbledon and Manchester United topics received overwhelmingly positive sentiments of more than 80 percent. Tweets about Michael Vick contained around 60 percent positive sentiments.
* Technology: Techmeme, Mashable and MacTweeter consistently ranked as top 10 influencers on trending technology topics of 2010, such as the Apple iPad and Google Android. Seventy-three percent of sentiments about the iPad and Android were positive.
* Hashtags: For the trending topic #thankful, in which people tweet about what they are thankful for, Bieber was again the most influencer tweeter. The sentiments of the tweets with #thankful hashtags were more than 98 percent positive. Coca-Cola was one of the top influencers for the topic of #icantlivewithout.
Read the full article here.
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