Social Media Week

Here we go again! This is Sheldon from Sysomos back again to help us all get prepared for Social Media Week. Using Sysomos’ industry leading social media monitoring and analytics software, MAP and Heartbeat, I’ve been exploring what the social universe has to say about each of our Social Media Week host cities. Today’s post will be exploring London, England.

Doing a search through social channels over the past six months for mentions of London I was able to find 2.7 million blogs, 3 million online news articles, 1.7 million forum postings and 10.9 million tweets.

When I take that data and trend it out over time we get the popularity graph below. We can see that six months ago there was the ending of a large spike in talk talk of London, which we’ll dig a little deeper into later on in this post. What’s even more interesting is in this graph is that talk of London seems to stay fairly steady across all channels for the rest of the six months minus what appears to be a slight lull around Christmas time. This we don’t see very often.

I then looked into where all this social chatter about London was coming from. No surprise that most amount of mentions were being generated from the UK (37.3%). Like all the other cities I’ve explored previously, the United States and Canada are also among the top countries creating chatter (29.2% and 3.9% respectively). We can also see that London is being talked about around the world with countries like Germany (3.7%) and  Australia (2.9%) also creating significant amounts of mentions.

When I pulled up a buzzgraph about all of the London chatter it started to become clear why there was so much talk from all over the world. Looking at the buzzgraph we can see two main themes; the London riots that occurred last summer and the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics, which are being held in London.

I then a dug a bit deeper into who was creating all of the London chatter. I started on Twitter and used technology exclusive to Sysomos to discover that 55% of the mentions of London were made by males while females accounted for the other 45%. I also pulled up the top Twitter sources that were mentioning London. These were the Twitter accounts that mentioned London the most and had a higher authority score. In most of the cities I’ve previously looked at the account with the most mentions of a city were news or classified accounts. In the case of London though, it turns out that the most mentions came from @H2kRadioDotCom, a local radio station (12.87%). The second most mentions of London came from two job classified accounts, @jobldnit and @mathfi_jobs, who accounted for 10.89% each.

Next, I delved into the blogs that were mentioning London. Here I found almost the same gender split as I did on Twitter, except the ladies had gained a percentage. Male bloggers accounted for 54% of those mentioning London and the females 46%. I also found the bloggers mentioning London the most were aged 21-35 (43.1%). While bloggers aged 20 and under talked about London the least with only 13.6%.

While bloggers who are 20 and under accounted for the smallest age group talking about London, I found that blogs categorized as student blogs made up the largest amount at 16.1%. Student blogs were tied for the most mentions with arts blogs. These were followed by blogs that were classified as education blogs at 10.2%. This may have something to do with the riots in London that drew attention from and were mainly being acted on by a lot of college and university aged people.

I then dug into some of the activity spikes we found in the popularity graph above. The first and largest spike was right at the beginning of my six month look between August 9-12. As I stated earlier, this was the tail end of the London riots that occurred this past summer. We can see a lot of riot related chatter in the buzzgraph including the terms “riot,” “riots,” “rioter” and “rioting” right in the center. We can also see locations of the riots like “Totenham,” “Liverpool” and “Manchester” scattered around te outside of the graph along with other riot related words.

Since there wasn’t a second large spike in activity to really dig into, I decided to try something a little bit different. Here I decided to investigate this big dip in activity that seemed to happen across all channels. This dip occurred between December 23-27, which could leads to one obvious answer as to why it happened; Christmas. When I looked at the buzzgraph for this time period it became obvious that the dip had to do with “Christmas,” which was one of the most connected words. It’s interesting that most of the talk mentioning London at this time focused around the Royal Family’s Christmas. We can see words like “royal” and “Buckingham” as prominent words in the buzzgraph.

And that is going to bring my look at London to a close. Join me again next time as I use Sysomos to find out what the world is saying about another one of our Social Media Week host cities.