Title:

Twitter For You: Correlation Between Events and their Trending Dates

Twitter, a well-established social networking service, is a powerhouse for information sharing in modern-day media. Specifically, the trending feature has dominated the popularity of current events and annual holidays. This is done by users using topics as keywords in their tweets and hashtags, and having a large concentration of tweets within a certain amount of time. This study aims to determine what Twitter’s trending tab denotes as major events or times of year. Testing the hypothesis that more global events (e.g., Ukraine) will trend for longer as opposed to more national events (e.g., Presidents’ Day), Twitter’s API was used to gather data and Python scripts parsed the formatted the trending information. The results showed that it did not matter how global an event was. The trending time was the same or shorter than their official allotted time as an event. The correlation had to do more with how long each event was. Valentine’s Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Presidents’ Day are all one-day events that trended for their official day and a few hours into the next day. This is due to the difference in time zones among Twitter users. However, events that span over multiple days, like the Winter Olympics, Superbowl Weekend, and March Madness trended after the official starting date and ended before their official ending date. The outcome of this study proposes that the Twitter community is capable of consistently keeping shorter events trending while keeping longer events trending for the beginning and end of their allotted time.

Name

Comment*

Comments are viewable only by submitter

Captcha*