Is Twitter really ‘The Voice’ of the people?
In this guest post, Hugh Stephens analyses the conversation on Twitter during The Voice and asks whether there were more opportunities for television integration.
The Voice has certainly been one of the shining stars of Nine’s repertoire of late.
With this week’s final, I thought it would be worthwhile to have a quick look at the tweets to see how they changed over the course of the program.
I collected some 38,000 tweets to analyse. There was a distinct peak around when the winners were announced.
Love that tweet from ‘enter quote author’
Hi J – shouldn’t be enter quote author – works for me and at infogr.am! http://infogr.am/The-voice-fin.....tter-talk/ –> it’s a beta service so might be a tad buggy…
One correction. The Voice did allow online voting…via their FB page and website. How this changes the numbers I’ve no idea.
Interesting and informative article. Thank you.
However just so you know there was Facebook voting for The Voice. The first time this has been done by a reality TV show, I expect there will be more of it.
What I would find interesting to know is the demographics of each voting portal ie Facebook, SMS, and via itunes.
Out of curiosity, how did you acquire all the twitter data?
Thanks Emma and Ricki – hadn’t noticed the FB voting (maybe they should have promo’ed it harder!)
Re how we collected – combination of methods. I dont like hootsuite’s archive function as I find it quite ineffective. We use a combination of existing self-installed tools that we’ve modified, Yahoo! pipes JSON/Atom feeds and a few other things if necessary. Our Amazon cloud-hosted tweet backup / archive tool is usually the best as it scales well for times like this – need to be able to capture a lot of data quickly!
Quade Cooper plays rugby union, not NRL.
How do you get 1.8 million imps? Does tweeting 3 times during the show when you have 600K followers, really equal 1.8 million? Smells like BS to me.
I follow but didn’t see the tweets. And on the flip side, what about the people who see tweets based on hashtag and name searches…
I thought similar analysis was done of American Idol which concluded that whomever was tweeted about the most (irregardless of positive or negative) was almost always the one who was voted out that week…. Which would support the fact that DeBono was the most active and was placed fourth…
http://mashable.com/2011/05/25.....-winner-2/
I thought the social integration was great, but your tips for improvement are excellent. I hope their marketers are reading this.
What you don’t mention is their very active presence on Facebook. They were certainly updating their page all the time with impromptu (if there is such a thing in marketing) videos, photos, interviews etc. You could also vote via their Facebook app. Quite frankly, between watching the tv screen, the twitter stream and facebook, it was a frantic time trying to catch it all.
Gee aren’t you jumping on the bandwagon in an uninformed way?!?! Did you look at the volume of behind the scenes video content on the show’s website, or the amount of content posted on facebook during the show?! The volume of likes and comments on these posts were huge
DD – Victorian here…so Union and NRL get confused in my mind at times.
Re impressions, calculated as you suggested. It’s certainly not a hugely accurate number – like most SM impressions (excepting FB Reach) you don’t necessarily know if all those accounts are online – or even ‘real’ (eg just trying to sell you things to make you smaller or bigger). It’s a sum total ‘potential’ calculated and certainly a murky score. And yes – doesn’t take into account hashtag/name searches, so possibly some balance?
While not a brilliant estimator of actual reach, IMO it’s better than (or at least useful as well as) the number of unique people tweeting – because 1000 people with 10 followers each (mean Twitter followers) doesn’t give you an indication of how many ‘influential’ people are tweeting about it. And social is all about engaging the key influencers.
Leisai – saw that analysis but to me it seems a tad backwards. How the volume of tweets impacts voting depends a lot on sentiment – and unless you go through and hand-code the sentiment you often end up with an average quality result. Would love to test the hypothesis properly by running the analysis over the whole show’s duration… one day ….
@bob – there was some content but not much of it was overly ‘personal’ – these shows are all about the experience and relationship of the viewer…and by far most of the content was promo material or clips from the show. There were a couple of Google Hangouts (who uses G+ though?) which was at least a step forward… And yes, there was more content on FB than there was on Twitter/YT… I would’ve still liked to see more personality from the people themselves (it’s about the country falling in love with their fav singer) than only trying to build the voice brand
@Carolyn: agreed that it was pretty good…and their FB page is great (quite a young audience though – I’d love to see how it compares to viewer demographics).
I also agree a lot about needing to centralise the FB/Twitter activity! We’re actually developing a tool like TwitterFall (twitter monitoring) that pulls twitter & FB data, for some of our event/conferencing clients….so there might be a tool out there *eventually* that would help out…
Same as everyone else; not the best “consultation” I’ve read… how well researched were your conclusions?
1. All artists have Twitter pages and tweets from the main Voice account were constant. There seems to already be a Voice account on all the main platforms (Facebook/Twitter/YouTube)… even G+).
And a quick Google search found the official Pinterest page: http://pinterest.com/thevoiceau/
2. Lots of behind-the-scenes content online via Tw/Fb/Yt
3. Facebook voting was plugged by the host guy every week!
4. Reading through Facebook, their community is already active and engaged in a 2-way convo with “the Voice”. With auditions open for next year already, I think the traffic will remain.
have you actually looked at and watched any of the behind the scenes video content?!
So really you’re just trying to flog a tool for social media monitoring and engagement? There are plenty of these in market – and the only thing in common with them all is that their conclusions vary greatly – especially sentiment!
I know of another method. Watch the show and wait for Darren to read the name from the envelope. Quite an enjoyable methodology and surprisingly accurate.
@Floyd : flog our tool we are not. We don’t sell it – its a personal experimental version of yourTwapperKeeper (if you know it) modified to work and localise searches. YTK is a free/open source tool – i discovered it through the old service. The guys at ANU have done some great research into sociological networks on twitter using it and gawk – their analysis of the bush fires is well worth a read.
Sadly I wish we had a fancy expensive tool, but its just modified open source tech, an installation of R an basic text analytics.
@John Grono: wish there was a LIKE button for that comment.
Winner Karise Eden was consistently overshadowed in frequency compared to Sarah DeBono. How do you measure Karise’s over shadowing ?
This is pretty personal. Joel Madden thanking a super fan for their support during the show! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LelXLAp4wM&feature=youtu.be
@Angie: word frequencies in the tweets…
…”and unless you go through and hand-code the sentiment you often end up with an average quality result”
exactly. Social media monitoring tools are a giant load of BS.
Volume doesn’t reflect intention.
People cling to metrics such as number of followers and ‘Likes’ and determine success or failure. It’s largely useless.
Hugh, your suggestions (outside of your lack of noticing the Facebook interaction) are certainly valid and I assume with 2013’s production these points and more will be covered for a richer interaction with the audience and viewers.
Like many more will in the near future, I engage in Social TV for the humorous activity (although I cannot keep up at times) and certainly believe Twitter helped to raise the profile of The Voice however giving the contestants more of a personality during on-air time (not just in the V Room) would have assisted the individuals’ brand, for post-show movement. I think they were blocked by the host there doing her job for Vodafone.
As for the winner and how social media worked or did not work, it’s common knowledge the underdog more often than not makes it to Number One on the night.
Overall, impressive television viewing with the Twitter crossover — almost as good as Q&A.
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hugh: there is another article that demonstrates it throughout that entire season of Idol (sorry, couldn’t find it since it was published a over a year ago). Every week (except two) it was true
Great comment KP! I follow and Tweet during Q&A. Can’t wait for some kind of dual screen for TV driven social interaction in the near future.
Nice analysis BTW, however by analysing only one channel, and by dint of the headline this piece has been given, the article becomes a little sidetracked.
Why should there be a single channel that is the ‘voice of the people’?
Everyone in the media and communications industry recognizes that media has fragmented.
When top TV programs in Australia attract 3 million viewers this is considered large – and it is in a strict numerical sense. However by percentage it represents a far smaller share of ‘the public’ that in past decades.
With the fragmentation of media comes a fragmentation of voice. The public aren’t all on Twitter, or even Facebook (which has roughly 7x as many subscribers in Australia as Twitter).
Analyzing one channel tells us interesting stuff about that channel, shaped by its specific attributes, however doesn’t give a broad view of the ‘voice of the people’.
I would be interested in seeking how the Voice contestants fared on Facebook, where (and which) voting took place, what blogs and forums were saying.
Cross-channel analysis is likely to reveal more of the jigsaw puzzle of consumer voice. This Twitter analysis is useful and interesting, but don’t mistake the piece of the puzzle for the puzzle itself.
BTW I like Twapperkeeper as well and also use services such as The Archivist and commercial social media analyst tools.
However in my view no-one has yet cracked the market for providing excellent cross-channel social analysis tools. I keep hoping someone will 🙂