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Analysing #DayOfSilence on Twitter

Lily Lieberman is a Junior at Arizona State. She is currently interning with Olytico as part of the CAPA study abroad programme.

With the same-sex marriage referendum vote fast approaching on May 22nd, LGBTQ issues are a hot topic in Ireland. On April 11, Irish street artist  Joe Caslin erected a giant mural on the side of a building on South Great George’s Street, supporting a ‘yes’ vote in the equality referendum. The mural has caused a significant reaction in Ireland and around the world, with top publications including Buzzfeed covering the story.

Last week in the U.S., another major LGBT campaign was launched. Day of Silence is a student-led event that brings attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in schools. On April 17th, students across the globe took a vow of silence in an effort to illustrate the silencing effect of bullying and harassment on LGBT students. Olytico monitored and analysed social conversations surrounding Day of Silence 2015 from April 14th – 20th. Here’s what we found:

Key Words 

We tracked the hashtag #dayofsilence and the Twitter handle @dayofsilence.

Key Numbers 

Almost 19,000 tweets in total

Over 14,200 tweets on April 17

Over 11,100 unique Twitter accounts contributed

Over 59,400,000 potential impressions 

An estimated reach of over 18,700,000 accounts

Top 100 Words

Screen Shot 2015-04-28 at 10.32.53 AM

Of the 18,972 tweets mentioning Day of Silence, ‘bullying’ was mentioned 3,038 times with high profile LGBTQ activists like Laverne Cox, Perez Hilton and Aubrey O’Day advocating an end to bullying.

The word ‘awareness’ was mentioned 773 times highlighting the main goal of the activist organizations: to end harassment and abuse of LGBT youth.

 Day By Day 

It was little surprise that April 17th, the Day of Silence, led to the highest spike in conversation: 14,270 tweets.

Laverne Cox had the highest retweeted tweet on April 17th with 467 retweets expressing solidarity with all students. The word ‘solidarity’ was mentioned 698 times over the course of the week. Cox, an actress on “Orange is the New Black” and an LGBTQ activist, is the first transgender person to be on the cover of Time magazine.

ElloSteph, a Tumblr and Youtube personality and the Monday correspondent for LGBTV, had the second highest retweeted tweet at 341 times. 

Top Tweets 

Here are the top 5 most retweeted tweets (excluding the above tweets from Laverne Cox and ElloSteph):

https://twitter.com/feministculture/statuses/588732404472356864

https://twitter.com/SaraRamirez/statuses/589130117126828032

#Hashtags

Hashtags were an important part of the Day of Silence campaign. The hashtag #DayofSilence was mentioned in 18,080 tweets. We’ve identified the top 10 hashtags:

#SelfieForSilence, a campaign to snap a selfie to end the silence around anti-LGBT bullying and harassment, had 221 tweets mentioning the hashtag.

#KidsMatterOk  is a campaign started by Bossy Kids, whose mission is to spread love, compassion and empowerment. The hashtag was mentioned 95 times.

Most Retweeted Contributors 

Below are the top 10 Contributors based on the volume of retweets of their Day of Silence content.

Conclusion 

The importance of using social media to promote a cause or event has long been known.  Measuring how that promotion is received and learning from social media analysis is also key. Listening to online conversations gives great insight into the success of a campaign and can also help improve future campaigns.

If you’re interested in learning about your event or campaign through social listening, contact us to find out more.

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