The hashtag we chose was #HappyNewYear. Unsurprisingly, the hashtag peaked on January first, with over one million mentions on that day alone. The number of mentions plummeted the next day, before flat lining around January 10th.
While it makes sense that the number of mentions would be highest on the first before dropping off a cliff, there were still a relatively high number of mentions in the following days, which was a bit surprising. Twitter dominated the coverage on social media with 1.8 million mentions. It was a feat that wasn’t matched by other forms of social media.
Twitter also had the vast majority of mentions, with 96.4% of total mentions coming from Twitter. The most retweeted tweet came from Jared Padalecki, who had over 9,200 retweets, as well as over 33,000 likes on a tweet with a picture of him an his wife. Jared is an actor who played the character of Dean Forester on Gilmore Girls, and Sam Winchester on Supernatural.
Happy 2016 from @realGpad and me!!! #HappyNewYear pic.twitter.com/q9qJxeUTOZ
— Jared Padalecki (@jarpad) January 1, 2016
The most connected word to #HappyNewYear was 2016, which makes sense because its is the hashtag, but some of the words in our wordcloud and buzzgraph were fairly surprising and difficult to explain, like “pizza,” “got7,” and “shfly3424.” The United States had the highest percentage of #HappyNewYear mentions, with 41.3% because we drive media coverage around the world. People flock from all over the world to Times Square for the ball drop in waves not seen around the world. The second highest country was Japan, with 10.6%, followed by the United Kingdom with 6.6%.
Jasper Apollonia
John King
Jihun Han
Good analysis, guys. I am surprised that you didn’t find more word associations with things like: “Rockin’ New Year’s Eve”, or even big names like Dick Clark, Ryan Seacrest and any of the performers that performed on the big telecasts. This is especially surprising considering One Direction performed multiple times this year and Taylor Swift debuted her new video on New Years Eve. As big as these things supposedly are in our media culture, none of them carried over into trends on New Year’s Day. Perhaps this is a result of a changing media landscape. Also, Jared Padalecki? I love Gilmore Girls as much as the next girl but that one caught me off guard! Thanks for breaking this down for us. It was very interesting to see what you found.