#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 Clint Eastwood (3954 tweets-per-minute), Mitt Romney (3852 tweets-per-minute) and the balloon drop/end of Romney’s speech (4125 tweets-per-minute).
Times shown are in Eastern Daylight Time (UTC -4 due to Daylight Savings Time). Stats in this report cover Day 4 (August 3oth). Click the images to view full-size.
Day Total
Tweets : 606,074
Users : 213, 882
Mentions by the minute
This graph shows tweet levels (mentions) per minute, from 6 PM – 12 AM on August 30th. 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)]
- 19:55 PM = Newt & Callista Gingrich (734 users, 775 mentions)
- 20:15 PM = Jeb Bush (915 users, 968 mentions)
- 21:06 PM = Tom Stemberg (817 users, 860 mentions)
- 21:35 PM = US Olympians (1035 users, 1083 mentions)
- 22:03 PM = Clint Eastwood (2395 users, 2504 mentions)
- 22:15 PM = End of Clint Eastwood’s speech (3749 users, 3954 mentions)
- 22:21 PM = Marco Rubio (3008 users, 3189 mentions)
- 22:36 PM = Mitt Romney gets on stage (3152 users, 3276 mentions)
- 22:45 PM = Mitt Romney (3678 users, 3852 mentions)
- 23:00 PM = Mitt Romney (3604 users, 3785 mentions)
- 23:15 PM = Buzz after end of Mitt Romney’s speech; Balloon drop (3962 users, 4125 mentions)
Mentions by the hour
This graph shows tweet levels (mentions) and users tweeting per hour, from 00:00 – 23:59 on August 30th. The gap between the users and mentions indicates how hot the tweeting activity was. Mentions peaked at 185,165 tweets-per-hour at 10 PM.
The data is shown in the table below:
Hour | Users | Mentions |
0 | 9279 | 14827 |
1 | 4661 | 7318 |
2 | 2665 | 4490 |
3 | 1892 | 3325 |
4 | 1217 | 2047 |
5 | 1190 | 2098 |
6 | 1857 | 2966 |
7 | 3042 | 4873 |
8 | 4441 | 6997 |
9 | 6235 | 9422 |
10 | 6714 | 10615 |
11 | 7223 | 10857 |
12 | 7636 | 11438 |
13 | 7432 | 11031 |
14 | 8217 | 12109 |
15 | 7916 | 11611 |
16 | 9086 | 13402 |
17 | 8247 | 12191 |
18 | 8773 | 13268 |
19 | 12335 | 21500 |
20 | 21264 | 42676 |
21 | 25962 | 50997 |
22 | 79982 | 185165 |
23 | 78043 | 140851 |
Location of Tweeple
This map shows where geo-located tweets on the convention were coming from in the United States. Each blue dot represents one tweet. Unlike previous days we couldn’t show English/Non-English tweets. This is because the Streaming API does not include Twitter’s auto-detected language. Our own language detection system is optimised for distinguishing English from Malay/Indonesian, so it is not appropriate to apply to this set of tweets.
Differences from yesterday are a lot more tweets are visible on the map, expanding on existing clusters.
Popularity of Searchterms
The list below is a breakdown of how many users wrote tweets containing each searchterm, from 00:00 – 23:59 August 30th. It is ordered by the number of users.
- #RNC = 123032 users, 299770 mentions
- #GOP2012 = 69412 users, 178614 mentions
- #RNC2012 = 53265 users, 127807 mentions
- @MittRomney = 49836 users, 80497 mentions
- #RomneyRyan2012 = 39154 users, 62978 mentions
- @PaulRyanVP = 20622 users, 31021 mentions
- #tcot = 16315 users, 58920 mentions
- @GOPConvention = 3185 users, 5233 mentions
- #WeBuiltIt = 1308 users, 1690 mentions
Its interesting that #RNC was more widely used than #GOP2012, the official hashtag for the convention. Mentions of @GOPConvention and #WeBuiltIt continued to remain low as in the previous days. We missed out on tracking #BelieveInAmerica.
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 30th. We will recalculate the popular tweets for the whole convention once its over.
1. Mitt Romney, 3212 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/241346128765931520]2. Mitt Romney, 2811 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/241336850999029761]3. Paul Ryan, 2114 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/PaulRyanVP/status/241374259765723136]4. Mitt Romney, 1822 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/241235548122013696]5. Mitt Romney, 1739 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/MittRomney/status/241271787516751872]6. Marco Rubio, 1548 RTs
[tweet https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/241352424688844800]Note
We collected 606, 074 tweets from 213,882 users. Our system was modified to collect tweets from both the Streaming API and Search API. This helped avoid any dips in the graph or ‘ceiling’ issues like in Day 3. Twitter wrote a blog post giving the #GOP2012 stats as 2 million, with the peak at 14289 tweets per minute at the end of Mitt Romney’s speech. Our peak was 4125 tweets per minute. Their second peak was at 11.09 PM EST with 13267 tweets-per-minute. Our stats for that time show 3097 tweets-per-minute.
Using our combined API approach, we seem to be getting about 20-28% of the real total. But without more details on what searchterms Twitter is using, or similar graphs to ours, we can’t be sure. 95782 tweets about the convention came exclusively from Twitter Search, and were not obtained using the Streaming API. So for the sake of completeness, both APIs need to be used for major events.
Previous Reports