#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. Starting Day 3 we also tracked #WeBuiltIt.
The highest levels of interest were for Condoleezza Rice (1232 tweets-per-minute), Susana Martinez (1353 tweets-per-minute) and Paul Ryan (1405 tweets-per-minute).
Times shown are in Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -4 due to Daylight Savings Time). Stats in this report cover Day 3 (August 29th). Click the images to view full-size.
Day Total
Tweets : 322,162
Users : 121, 009
Mentions by the minute
This graph shows tweet levels (mentions) per minute, from 6 PM – 12 AM on August 29th. 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)]
- 20:14 PM = John McCain (692 users, 718 mentions)
- 20:33 PM = Pam Bondi and Sam Olens (578 users,599 mentions)
- 21:09 PM = Rob Portman (589 users, 620 mentions)
- 21:34 PM = Tim Pawlenty (1023 users, 1090 mentions)
- 21:54 PM = Mike Huckabee (979 users, 1014 mentions)
- 21:57 PM = Condoleezza Rice (1023 users, 1059 mentions)
- 22:01 PM = Condoleezza Rice (1051 users, 1099 mentions)
- 22:07 PM = Condoleezza Rice (1189 users, 1232 mentions)
- 22:17 PM = Susana Martinez and post-speech praise for Condoleezza Rice (1307 users, 1364 mentions)
- 22:25 PM = Susana Martinez (1282 users, 1353 mentions)
- 22:35 PM = Paul Ryan (1223 users, 1269 mentions)
- 22:45 PM = Paul Ryan (1230 users, 1306 mentions)
- 22:59 PM = Paul Ryan (1380 users, 1405 mentions)
- 23:07 PM = Post-speech commentary (1357 users, 1423 mentions)
Our system had trouble keeping up with the tweet volume starting from the time Condoleezza Rice spoke. This is why the graph has many dips from that point on.
Mentions by the hour
This graph shows tweet levels (mentions) and users tweeting per hour, from 00:00 – 23:59 on August 29th. The gap between the users and mentions indicates how hot the tweeting activity was. The almost horizontal levels of tweets is an indication of a ‘ceiling’ that our system hit, because we used the Twitter Search API instead of the Streaming API. A discussion of that can be found in this blog post.
The data is shown in the table below:
| Hour | Users | Mentions |
| 0 | 9393 | 14485 |
| 1 | 4428 | 6715 |
| 2 | 2430 | 3821 |
| 3 | 1579 | 2343 |
| 4 | 1129 | 1802 |
| 5 | 1088 | 1733 |
| 6 | 1816 | 2623 |
| 7 | 2838 | 4086 |
| 8 | 3861 | 5670 |
| 9 | 6015 | 9035 |
| 10 | 6461 | 9700 |
| 11 | 6375 | 9893 |
| 12 | 6563 | 9855 |
| 13 | 6296 | 9643 |
| 14 | 6154 | 9218 |
| 15 | 6451 | 9440 |
| 16 | 6126 | 9167 |
| 17 | 6232 | 9056 |
| 18 | 6219 | 9407 |
| 19 | 10516 | 19245 |
| 20 | 14460 | 27037 |
| 21 | 19868 | 39471 |
| 22 | 28113 | 52754 |
| 23 | 28574 | 45963 |
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. Differences from yesterday are more tweets from Vancouver and more tweets distributed across America, noticeably from Missouri until the east coastline.
Popularity of Searchterms
The list below is a breakdown of how many users wrote tweets containing each searchterm, from 00:00 – 23:59 August 29th. It is ordered by the number of users.
- #GOP2012 = 42049 users, 89308 mentions
- #RNC = 45455 users, 80869 mentions
- #RNC2012 = 32022 users, 65012 mentions
- @MittRomney = 24588 users, 36093 mentions
- #tcot = 15304 users, 55481 mentions
- @PaulRyanVP = 14898 users, 21945 mentions
- #RomneyRyan2012 = 10618 users, 17055 mentions
- @GOPConvention = 3350 users, 5482 mentions
- #WeBuiltIt = 2272 users, 2949 mentions
Compared to yesterday, the relative ordering remains the same except for mentions of @PaulRyanVP, which moved up a place. The new hashtag we tracked, #WeBuiltIt, had relatively few 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 29th. We will recalculate the popular tweets for the whole convention once its over.
1. Paul Ryan, 1289 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/PaulRyanVP/status/241000384305430528]2. Paul Ryan, 1167 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/PaulRyanVP/status/241009592153296896]3. Mitt Romney, 838 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/240649171869257729]4. Mitt Romney, 831 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/240919648856576000]5. Paul Ryan, 828 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/PaulRyanVP/status/241004332433166336]Note
We collected 322, 162 tweets from 121,009 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. Twitter wrote a blog post giving the #GOP2012 stats as over 2 million, with the peak at 6669 tweets per minute during Paul Ryan’s speech. Our peak was 1405 tweets per minute. Given this big discrepancy, for Day 4 of the convention we will be using both the Search API and Streaming API.
