This year, we have 29 days in February, which only happens only once every four years. The last day of February becomes a hot topic. Although it’s not an official holiday, the hashtag #leapday got 403.5K mentions by 381K users on Twitter.
What are they talking about?
Looking at the wordcloud and buzzgraph, the most mentioned words are “happy” “leap” “celebration” “mondaymotivation” and “birthday”. Clearly, most users hold a positive attitude towards the leap day and did something fun to celebrate this special day.
Coincidentally, the leap day happens on Monday and another hot hashtag # mondaymotivation appear naturally. Monday is tough for most people and maybe something unusual can be a good motivation to cheer up.
Where are they from?
Most mentions come from the United States, then comes UK and India, which means Twitter users from these three countries are more active when talking about leap day. The top five countries are from different continents and culture systems but their activeness is adjacent (except US because more than 50% of Twitter users are US based Sysomos’s worldwide Twitter data) because leapday is a global topic and neutral.
The most retweeted twitter
This is typically under the effect of opinion leader. Manchester United has 7.29M followers on Twitter and of course his tweets would have more retweets. Another reason is the content of this tweet, it joked about Marucs, the famous player of MU. For fans, this friendly inner joke is something they would like to retweet and for those who are not familiar with MU, the picture explains “leap” perfectly and it’s just for leap day.
Happy #LeapDay! Take it away, Marcus… pic.twitter.com/8EFcVjXOmq
— Manchester United (@ManUtd) February 29, 2016
References:
Sysomos (2010) WORLDWIDE TWITTER DATA: NUMBER OF TWITTER USERS BY COUNTRY. Retrieved from http://sysomos.com/inside-twitter/number-twitter-users-country
I find it interesting that Canada did not have a large share of voice for #leapday. I wonder what #leapday looks like on actual leap years compared to non leap years and what those word clouds and buzz graphs look like. I would imagine it would be even more central around birthdays since those born in a leap year will probably be the most likely to want to comment on their birthday being skipped.