It’s getting close to another Social Media Week and once again Sysomos is very happy to be a part of it. We’ve teamed up once again with the global Social Media Week team to help provide social media tracking and analytics for everything SMW. Using our industry leading software, MAP and Heartbeat, we’ll watching all the talk in social media and providing updates to the organizers and public about what we’re able to see. I’m Sheldon, the community manager for Sysomos and I’ll be the one doing all of these posts.
They say that you can learn a lot about a city if you listen to people’s opinions about it. Because of that, this time around I’ve decided to try something a little different. For the last Social Media Week in September, I took a look at talk about social media coming from each of our host cities. This time instead of looking at talk coming from just our host cities, I’m going to be using MAP to see what the world is saying about our host cities. Using search terms such as names and abbreviations for our host cities, I’ll be looking at what the entire social media world is saying about the city. I’ll be looking at what’s being said, who’s saying it, who talks the most about each city, and I’ll also take a dive into large spikes in activity surrounding each city.
Since there’s no telling just what the online conversation will say about each of our Social Media Week cities, I thought it would only be fair if I started with mine and Sysomos’ home, Toronto, Ontario, in Canada. Doing a search to see how often it’s mentioned through social channels, I found Toronto being talked about over the past six months in 815,011 blog posts, 1 million online news articles, 686,436 forum posts and 2,7 million tweets.
Trending that data over time we get a popularity graph that looks like the following. We can see two large spikes in activity over the past six months, one towards the end of August and the other around mid-September. We’ll take a deeper look at those two spikes in a bit.
Next, I looked into where all the talk about Toronto over the past six months was coming from. Not surprisingly, the majority of talk about Toronto was coming from within Canada. Canada accounted for 47.5% of all talk about Toronto through social channels. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that the majority of talk about all of our host cities winds up coming from the country they’re located in. The other two countries I found talking about Toronto the most were the United States at 34.7%, followed by the UK with 3%.
I then pulled up a buzzgraph to see what people were saying about Toronto. A buzzgraph shows us some of the most common words being used in conjunction with our search terms and how they’re connected. Darker lines between words mean they’re used more often together, while the dotted lines means less frequent use together, but still enough to stand out. The terms we found most being used when talking about Toronto were “Canada,” “Canadian” and “Ontario.” We can also see other Canadian cities seem to be talked about a lot when people talk about Toronto. Cities such as “Vancouver,” “Ottawa” and “Montreal.” Two other things seem to stand out in this buzzgraph. The first being “TSX” which is the short form for the Toronto Stock Exchange, and second, “Raptors” the name of Toronto’s NBA team.
For the next step, I dug into who was doing all the talking. I started with the blogs that are talking about Toronto. Finding user provided information I found that both men (53%) and women (47%) bloggers have been talking about Toronto almost evenly. I also learned that bloggers aged 21-35 (40%) mentioned Toronto the most in their blogs.
I then looked at the industry of the blogs that were talking the most about Toronto. Here I found that arts focused blogs were talking the most about Toronto (13%). I can speak from experience that Toronto is a Canadian hotbed for music, theatre and other arts. The industry that talked the second most about Toronto were communications blogs (9.8%), followed by a tie for third place between architecture blogs and publishing focused blogs (8.1% each).
Next, I moved over to Twitter. It’s a bit harder to find demographic information from Twitter, but thankfully Sysomos can pull some. Using a method exclusive to our Sysomos software I was able to find the gender of tweeters talking about Toronto. I found that like blogs, the split is almost even with 55% being male and the other 45% female. I also pulled up the Twitter accounts that mention Toronto the most and our system has given a authority ranking of more than seven. In this inspection I found that many classified type Twitter accounts mention Toronto the most, like the account with the most mentions, @TorontoBizCaf. The account with the second most mentions is an account that just retweets people talking about Toronto known as @Toronto_RT. Also among the top accounts I found @nationalpost, a Canadian national newspaper, and @fan590, a Toronto based sports radio station.
For the last part of my look at what the world of social media has to say about Toronto I dug a bit deeper into the larger spikes in social activity I found. The largest spike in activity I found occurred between August 21-25. I focused in on those dates and pulled up a buzzgraph to get a overview of the convcersation happening those days. Turns out that this spike in activity was due to the death Jack Layton, the head of one of Canada’s major political parties, the NDP. Layton had lived in Toronto and brought his party a large rise in popularity over recent years and his death was a big deal across all of Canada regardless of political beliefs.
The second largest spike I found in conversation of Toronto came the following month in September. From September 7-14 the city is host to The Toronto International Film Fest, also known as TIFF. During that time the city receives a lot of attention from all over the world as big stars and movie premiers are all anyone can talk about.
That’s all for my look at what the world of social media has to say about Toronto. I’ll be back here quite frequently looking at the other 11 host cities as we lead up to the start of Social Media Week. See you then.
