Hello once again. This is Sheldon from Sysomos back once again to help us prepare for the upcoming Social Media Week. Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, I’m taking a look at what the world is saying through social media about each of our host cities. Today, we’ll be exploring the city of Paris, France.
I started off my search by looking for all of the talk about Paris going on in the past six months. In that time I was able to find 1.9 million blogs, 1.7 million online news articles, 1 million forum postings and 4.8 million tweets mentioning Paris.
Trended out over time we can see that like most other cities we’ve looked at, with Twitter being the dominent social channel. What’s interesting to note in the popularity chart below is how the news seems to dip every weekend. It’s as if much less is going on in Paris on the weekends, but I find that hard to believe.
I then broke down where all the chatter about Paris was coming from. Paris has a reputation of being one of the most romantic places on earth, so it’s not surprise that it garners a lot off attention from the rest of the world. 29% of all the talk about Paris was coming out of France. The next three countries talking about Paris seem to always be top countries in conversations; the USA (26.8), the UK (6.5%) and Canada (3.8%). What’s interesting is that Germany talked about Paris just as much as Canada, and Brazil (3.2%) wasn’t far behind either.
Next, I pulled up a buzzgraph, which shows us words we find most connected to talk about our search terms, which in this case is Paris. Unfortunately, there was nothing terribly interesting in this particular buzzgraph. Most of the words were quite generic, such as “France” in the center, the country Paris resides in. As well we see “Sarkozy” who is the current president of France and “Europe.” However, there is one thing that seems to stand out a bit here. You may have noticed the word “niggas” towards the top of the buzzgraph. This isn’t there because of racism in any way, but rather thanks to Jay-Z and Kanye’s wildly popular track “Niggas In Paris” from their Watch The Throne album which came out in the fall.
I then started to dig a little deeper into the people that were talking about Paris though social media. Over in the blogs that were talking about Paris I found that both men and women seem to have an affinity about Paris. The split between the two genders was almost dead even with females making 51% of the mentions and males the other 49%. I also found that bloggers aged 21-35 talked about Paris the most (51%). What’s interesting here is that every other age demographic talked about Paris the exact same amount, with 16.3% of conversations coming from each other category.
I then moved over to Twitter. Here the gender split was almost the same as it was in the blogs, except that females moved up another 1% to 52% while males made up the other 48%. When I looked for the top Twitter sources mentioning Paris the most I found something interesting that I hadn’t found in any other city before. The usual classified type accounts still existed, like @Perfectly_Paris, which does apartment rentals for Paris, but there was also a great amount of accounts from outside of France. One of these accounts was a music producer named @HeleneScrive who seems to have a popular song called “Paris sous La Pluie.” There were quite a few other music related accounts like @Hitboy_SC, from California, who seemed to mention Jay-Z and Kanye’s track “Niggas In Paris” quite often.
For the last part of my analysis on what the social world is saying about Paris I looked into two of the larger activity spikes that I found in the past six months. The first spike mainly occurred on Twitter between November 7-11. During this time the ATP World Tour was holding it’s French Masters in Paris. We can see that “masters” is a strongly connected word in the buizzgraph, but we can also go through and pick out a few tennis player’s names such as Novak “Djokovic” and Tomáš “Berdych” who were playing in the tournament.
The second spike I looked at was much more recent. From January 26-29 we can see a spike in activity about Paris on Twitter as well as in the news and on blogs. This spike was a little more interesting as their are a few key things going on here that mention Paris. First, is that the football (soccer for the North American’s) are all abuzz about the potential for Chelsea player Rodrigo Alex Dias da Costa to transfer over to the Paris St “Germain” team. The other thing going on in the buzzgraph actually has nothing to do with Paris the city. It actually has to do with Paris “Jackson,” daughter of the King of Pop, who recently said in public that she has a thing for Justin Bieber. If there’s anything that I’ve learned from analyzing social medis stats over the past few years is that anything that has to do with Bieber spreads quickly and in large amounts through social channels. Why that is, I can’t really tell you. Ask the closest 13 year old girl, she’ll probably be able to tell you why.
This was one of the more interesting host city studies I’ve done so far just because “Paris” seems to appear in talk all over the world and not all of it has to do with our Social Media Week City. I’ll be back again soon with another Sysomos look at yet another Social Media Week host cities.
