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Seachtain na Gaeilge – Analysing #SNAG15 on Twitter

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

When I first decided to study abroad in Dublin, family and friends continuously asked if I would be able to understand the accents, let alone comprehend the Irish language. I wasn’t particularly worried about learning Irish, figuring I would pick up a few words here and there during my stay. Fast forward two months and I am still hopeless at Irish but have come to admire the deep cultural impact of the language.

Seachtain na Gaeilge, Irish Language Week, is an international Irish language festival. Concerts, competitions, exhibitions and workshops are just a few of the many activities throughout the course of the festival. Seachtain na Gaeilge 2015, which ran from March 1-17 – provided an opportunity to monitor and analyse social conversations surrounding the festival celebrating all things Irish. Here’s what we found:

Key Words:

In addition to the phrase ‘Seachtain na Gaeilge’, the fortnight festival also had a number of hashtags and handles which we tracked. These included:  #SnaG2015, #Snag15, @SnaGaeilge and SnaGaeilge.

Key Numbers:

Over 11,000 tweets published

Over 4,500 unique Twitter accounts contributed

Over 27,000,000 potential impressions

An estimated reach of over 6 million accounts

Top 100 Words 

Screen Shot 2015-03-30 at 4.24.10 PM

Of the 11,321 tweets mentioning Seachtain na Gaeilge, ‘Uptown Funk’ was mentioned 627 times due to the popularity of the Gaeltacht schoolchildren’s cover of Uptown Funk.

The Irish word ‘rang,’ meaning class,  was mentioned 446 times, highlighting the importance of Seachtain na Gaeilge in relation to the classroom, schools, teachers and students.

One of the top contributors, Cumann Gaelach, which promotes all aspects of Irish society, tweeted about Seachtain na Gaeilge 56 times and received 166 retweets.

Day By Day

March 11 – A spike in conversation – 1069 tweets – surrounding Gaeltacht schoolchildren’s cover of Uptown Funk in Irish:

March 15 – The second highest spike – 800 tweets – was impacted by Ireland’s game versus Pakistan in the ICC World Cup. As in the tweet below – sent from Adelaide in South Australia, it’s amazing to see the Irish community all over the world supporting Seachtain na Gaeilge.

 

Top Tweets

Seachtain na Gaeilge was mentioned 11,000 times over the course of the festival. Here are the top 5 most retweeted tweets:

 

#Hashtags

Hashtags are an important aspect of every campaign. In the case of Seachtain na Gaeilge, #SnaG2015 proved to be the most popular way for people to express their interest in the festival with 2,573 tweets mentioning the hashtag. We’ve identified the top 10 hashtags from a total volume of 720 hashtags.

Contributors 

Below are the top 10 Contributors based on the volume of tweets published mentioning Seachtain na Gaeilge.

 

Conclusion

Having heard only snippets of the Irish language since my arrival in Ireland, I wasn’t quite sure if the country’s native tongue was growing or dying. Was it refined to the far west corners of Ireland and the Gaeltacht, battling for survival? Indeed not. This campaign highlights the Irish language is far from survival mode. If anything, the prominence of #SNAG15 on Twitter recently suggests the opposite. With over 11,000 tweets relating to Seachtain na Gaeilge, it’s clear that the Irish language is very much alive.

Interested in what’s being said about your festival or event? Contact us to find out more.

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