(after Ellen DeGeneres, of course)

We chose to analyze tweets about the “Selfie Kid” during the Super Bowl from February 1st-8th. Our search boolean was “selfie kid” AND “super bowl.” By utilizing Sysomos and the Twitter widgets “Latest Activity”, “Geography”, “Word Cloud” and “Buzzgraph”, we came to interesting conclusions about social media activity pertaining to this broadcast event.

Geography

It’s not too surprising to see that the US’s engagement with this trending topic dwarfs other countries. While the US accounted for 65% of the tweets related to this, the second most engaged area was the United Kingdom at 6.2%.

Buzzgraph

The buzzgraph shows which words are most related and connected in tweets. The most connected words for this topic were: “selfie” “kid” “selfie kid” “super” “bowl” “superbowl” “justin timberlake” and “timberlake”. Since it happened during Justin Timberlake’s halftime show, this isn’t very surprising.

Word Cloud

Similar to Buzzgraph, the word cloud shows words related to the trend, and emphasizes how frequently they were used by using a larger font. In addition to our boolean search terms, “justin” and “timberlake” are also bold and large because Justin Timberlake was also relevant to the conversation.

Most Retweeted Tweet

Based on our boolean search results, the most retweeted tweet that included both keywords had only 173 retweets. This was surprising initially, considering that selfie kid was one of the top trending topics. We tested out the search results comparing keywords “super bowl” versus “#superbowl,” and received the same results. When analyzing this tweet, we concluded that the use of two trending hashtags “#Superbowl and #PepsiHalftime” along with a meme photo collage are responsible for this tweet going viral.

Latest Activity

On the last day of our research (2/8), there was speculation the “Selfie Kid” would appear on The Ellen Show. This helped reignite the conversation around him on Twitter days after the Superbowl, especially since @theellenshow has over 17 million followers.

 

Ellen Greene, Molly Garrity, Amelia Elliot, Nicole Williams