cny_top_media_2016

The first day of Chinese New Year was celebrated worldwide on February 8th 2016. We collected tweets mentioning Chinese New Year in English and Bahasa Malaysia from February 7th – February 12th 2016. This was limited to the most common phrases – ‘Tahun Baru Cina’, ‘Chinese New Year’, ‘Gong Xi Fa Cai’, ‘CNY’ and similar spellings. Our focus was on identifying the content that was widely shared and the demographics of users tweeting Chinese New Year greetings.

From the tweets collected we prepared listing of popular tweets and media shared by users in Malaysia, limited by the language used. More details on the methodology used are at the end of this post.

Top Mentions

The following tweets were the most retweeted Chinese New Year tweets by users in Malaysia. Only public retweets were taken into account.

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Top Media

The following media were the most shared during this period. Media is ranked by URL shares and not retweets. For example the first media shown was shared 1,349 times by 1,340 users in Malaysia but was initially retweeted only 199 times. The tweets shown here represent the first usage of each image within this period.

Other Local Media

The following media are a selection of locally-produced content that were shared by less users than the previous list.

Popular Words

The word cloud below shows the most popular words in tweets about Chinese New Year. The size of the word is based on the number of times it was used with large words being the most popular. Common words and dominant words such as ‘Chinese’,’New’, ‘Year’ and ‘Cina’ were removed to better highlight words related to Chinese New Year.

cny_conversations_wordle

Twitter Community

This network graph shows how users based in Malaysia tweeting about Chinese New Year were connected to each other from February 7th – February 12th (UTC +8). There are 25,448 users in this network.

gephi_CNYConversations_Feb7_Feb12_Msia_1200px

Each user is represented as a node (circle) that is sized based on the number of tweets they sent to other users, and retweets of their own tweets. Large nodes are users who generated content that was shared and drew attention from other users. The nodes are also coloured based on a popularity scale from blue (low) to yellow, orange, red and purple (high). Nodes are connected to each other if they tweet to each other or retweet each other. Repeated interactions between users are represented as thicker lines.

This is a close-up view showing the most popular users:

gephi_CNYConversations_Feb7_Feb12_Msia_lbl_crop

There are 2 clear patterns in this network:

  • The most popular users are small in size, indicating they did not reach the majority of the community.  The most popular user (@_amranfanz) was only connected to 4.8% of the users in this network.
  • There is a cluster of connected users in the center of the network that were engaged in retweeting popular content, and a large number of users surrounding this cluster who were only engaged in conversation or making a small number (1-3) of retweets.
  • These patterns in the network indicate that Chinese New Year was not a conversation topic that was dominated by content (media/tweets) from popular users.

Ranked by popularity, the top 25 users were:

  1. @_amranfanz
  2. @itwitlawak
  3. @mesutozil1088
  4. @ottel
  5. @najibrazak
  6. @jamesjschai
  7. @rachelyappppp
  8. @manto_beats
  9. @ijaicool
  10. @_norman_g
  11. @songtrlplets
  12. @realabamapam
  13. @heyitsmehafiz
  14. @hazardeden10
  15. @aslannas
  16. @youthmalaysia
  17. @501awani
  18. @bschweinsteiger
  19. @premierleague
  20. @hafizirfan_
  21. @henrylau89
  22. @jaimnacuha
  23. @khusairiamin
  24. @rdzaminhat
  25. @lucaspeebo

Demographics and Methodology

We collected 809,983 tweets from 535,947 users tweeting about Chinese New Year. This is a sample of the global conversation limited to English and Bahasa Malaysia keywords.

We currently have a database of 597,373 Twitter users based in Malaysia. These users have been profiled based on their profile information and tweets collected since October 2014. We filtered tweets about Chinese New Year to get a dataset of tweets that were produced by local users.

After filtering we obtained 51,454 tweets from 34,277 users based in Malaysia. Using this dataset we then summarised the listing of popular tweets and media.

From the filtered total in Malaysia:

  • 16,701 retweets were made by 12,215 users.
  • 34,753 non-RT tweets were made by 25,040 users.
  • 13,526 tweets from 10,539 users contained images. There were a total of 5,372 unique image URLs. This includes retweets and embedded videos.

Only 32.5% of tweets were retweets of content made by other users. 67.5% of tweets were personal tweets e.g. opinions, images, well-wishes, messages to other users, links to websites, shared content from other websites, comments on other tweets and personal statements.

The breakdown of users by primary language is below.

Primary Language Users (%)
English 9,963 29.07
Hindi/Tamil 2 0.01
Bahasa Malaysia 20,727 60.47
Mixed 3,019 8.81
Other 322 0.94
Chinese 244 0.71

 

The following table lists the breakdown of users by state:

State Code Users (%)
MY/JHR 3,270 9.54
MY/KDH 1,204 3.51
MY/KTN 644 1.88
MY/KUL 6,449 18.81
MY/LBN 96 0.28
MY/MLK 1,487 4.34
MY/NSN 1,013 2.96
MY/PHG 1,233 3.60
MY/PJY 273 0.80
MY/PLS 320 0.93
MY/PNG 1,621 4.73
MY/PRK 1,754 5.12
MY/SBH 1,106 3.23
MY/SGR 11,365 33.16
MY/SWK 1,625 4.74
MY/TRG 817 2.38

 

If you are interested in consulting with us for location-based Twitter marketing or doing research on Malaysian topics of interest on Twitter, please contact admin@politweet.org .

Published On: February 25th, 2016 / Categories: Social Media / Tags: , , , , /