#GOP2012 is the official hashtag of the Republican National Convention currently being held at Tampa Bay, Florida from August 27th – August 30th. During this period we tracked mentions of #GOP2012, #RNC, #RNC2012, #RomneyRyan2012, #tcot, @GOPConvention, @MittRomney and @PaulRyanVP on Twitter.
The highest levels of interest were for Ann Romney (1422 tweets-per-minute) and Chris Christie (1491 tweets-per-minute).
Most of Day 1 events were postponed due to weather conditions related to Hurricane Isaac, and schedule was merged into Day 2. Stats shown start from Day 2 (August 28th 2012). Times shown are in Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -4 due to Daylight Savings Time). Click the images to view full-size.
Day Total
Tweets : 287,226
Users : 103, 932
Mentions by the minute
This graph shows tweet levels (mentions) per minute, from 1 PM – 12 AM on August 28th. Significant peaks are labeled on the graph. The peak times along with the main topic being tweeted about are listed below:
Format [Minute = Main speaker/topic being tweeted about (x users, y mentions)]
- 2:01 PM = GOP 2012 starts (200 users, 215 mentions)
- 5:43 PM = Mitt Romney wins the nomination (600 users, 640 mentions)
- 7:46 PM = Mia Love and Janine Turner (428 users, 444 mentions)
- 7:47 PM = Mia Love and Janine Turner (487 users, 517 mentions)
- 8:33 PM = John Kasich (675 users, 695 mentions)
- 8:59 PM = Gov. Scott Walker (665 users, 702 mentions)
- 9:33 PM = Rick Santorum (1029 users, 1076 mentions)
- 9:35 PM = Rick Santorum(1054 users, 1093 mentions)
- 10:17 PM = Ann Romney (1360 users, 1422 mentions)
- 10:41 PM = Chris Christie (1427 users, 1484 mentions)
- 10:50 PM = Chris Christie (teacher’s unions) (1230 users, 1262 mentions)
- 11:00 PM = Chris Christie (asking everyone to stand up for Mitt Romney, also praise for Chris Christie’s speech) (1466 users, 1491 mentions)
- 11:20 PM = Post-convention commentary (916 users, 961 mentions)
Mentions by the hour
This graph shows tweet levels (mentions) and users tweeting per hour, from 00:00 – 23:59 on August 28th. The gap between the users and mentions indicates how hot the tweeting activity was. The data is shown in the table below:
| Hour | Users | Mentions |
| 0 | 1032 | 1380 |
| 1 | 645 | 903 |
| 2 | 432 | 615 |
| 3 | 320 | 487 |
| 4 | 246 | 410 |
| 5 | 265 | 384 |
| 6 | 388 | 549 |
| 7 | 889 | 1239 |
| 8 | 1334 | 1871 |
| 9 | 2291 | 3060 |
| 10 | 2956 | 4130 |
| 11 | 3044 | 4084 |
| 12 | 4509 | 6514 |
| 13 | 6708 | 10594 |
| 14 | 6846 | 11374 |
| 15 | 7636 | 12649 |
| 16 | 8553 | 14825 |
| 17 | 11219 | 20529 |
| 18 | 9939 | 16099 |
| 19 | 10621 | 18871 |
| 20 | 15748 | 29539 |
| 21 | 20789 | 42260 |
| 22 | 26218 | 48011 |
| 23 | 24096 | 36849 |
Location of Tweeple
This map shows where geo-located tweets on the convention were coming from in the United States. Blue tweets are English, red tweets are non-English.
Popularity of Searchterms
The list below is a breakdown of how many users wrote tweets containing each searchterm, from 00:00 – 23:59 August 28th. It is ordered by the number of users.
- #GOP2012 = 39644 users, 92329 mentions
- #RNC = 38240 users, 71349 mentions
- #RNC2012 = 27557 users, 57593 mentions
- @MittRomney = 24638 users, 39126 mentions
- #tcot = 10625 users, 34678 mentions
- #RomneyRyan2012 = 8030 users, 14230 mentions
- @PaulRyanVP = 5230 users, 6750 mentions
- @GOPConvention = 4548 users, 7839 mentions
Popular tweets
The most retweeted (RT) tweets of the day are listed below, in order. We count the number of users who RT, not the number of times. This is to reduce the impact of spammers. RTs shown only cover retweets made on August 28th.
1. Sarah Silverman, 1514 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/SarahKSilverman/status/240494219075125249]2. Mitt Romney, 1011 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/240649171869257729]3. Ann Romney, 952 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/AnnDRomney/status/240633335196577792]4. Mitt Romney, 877 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/240565049675108352]5. Paul Ryan, 780 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/PaulRyanVP/status/240460954855436288]Note
At least 287,226 tweets about the GOP convention were tweeted by 103,932 users. Politweet uses Twitter’s Search API to track tweets for two reasons – to take advantage of Twitter’s spam-filtering; and because the Search API is closer to the end-user experience. However this means some genuine users are sometimes filtered out and their tweets are not obtained. Sometimes live tweets are missing from search results and only appear later, which causes them to be missed by our search.
For example despite the #RNC tag, Sarah Silverman’s original tweet was not found in our data, but all the retweets were. This is not to imply that Sarah Silverman was blocked, but a little missing data is just the nature of the Twitter search engine during live events. Journalists should note that the real totals are actually slightly higher.
Chris Christie delivered the highest number of tweets. For an idea of how big the crowd was while he was speaking, here is a screen capture from Youtube:
Update #1 (31st August 2012): Stats on this page are not ‘slightly lower’ as reported, but significantly lower. We caught on to the size of the discrepancy after Twitter wrote a blog post about the event. Explanation on the reason for this discrepancy is in this blog post. However the peaks on the graph are still relevant, and do indicate which speakers were most popular.
