We chose to do an analysis of tweets from ESPN. They are a media company that provides up-to-date scores, coverage and highlights of what’s going on in the world of sports. We found the trending topic through CrowdTangle, which allowed us to limit our search to only posts from 10/10-10/17/18 and then chose a trending topic based on the post with the highest engagement. Engagement is the number of times someone interacts with a tweet including replies, likes, retweets, and follows.
(We were couldn’t pull a graphic of 10/10-10/17/18 as CrowdTangle only showed a blank spreadsheet)
WHAT AN ENDING!
Here's the moment Terence "Bud" Crawford removed all doubt. pic.twitter.com/qYalKYXEqq
— ESPN (@espn) October 14, 2018
ESPN was able to get high engagement on this content by providing its viewers with rich media in its post. With a comment “WHAT A ENDING” in all caps, it draws the viewer’s attention toward this tweet and encourages readers to watch the video. Since rich media is becoming more popular among viewers, showing the knockout from the end of the round aligns perfectly with the criteria to make it go viral.
Using Twitters Advanced Search and Tweetdeck we developed a Boolean Search to find tweets that were engaging with our trending topic.
Terrance, OR Crawford, OR Bud, OR Jose, OR Benavidez, OR Title, OR Champion, OR knockout, OR Welter OR Weight -Errol -Spence to:espn @espn since:2018-10-12 until:2018-10-27
We then entered specific engagement criteria to identify the most popular responses to the event. As the original ESPN tweet earned over 16,000 retweets and 50,000 likes, we felt we could find tweets with a lot of engagement: at least 100 retweets, 250 likes, and 10 responses.
L M A O pic.twitter.com/BjcOXwJGKa
— CJ (@RiseInSilence) October 14, 2018
We believe the tweet posted by ESPN was trending for multiple reasons. First, a lot of sports fans are unfamiliar with the sport of boxing since it began offering fights strictly on a pay-per-view platform; because ESPN was able to offer the fight on its network for free, many were exposed to boxing and its stars for the first time in a while. In addition, the fight concluded with a devastating knockout that went viral almost immediately. An exciting boxing match provided fresh content for ESPN’s millions of followers.
Alex Manfredi, Austin Towns, Michael Ceribelli