Last night, August 20th 2013, Haley O’Sullivan, the Texas Rose, was crowned the winner of the 2013 Rose of Tralee, in front of a live audience in The Dome in Kerry. The event was broadcast live on RTÉ One, and as with the previous evening people took to Twitter to share their thoughts and opinions on the event.
Following on from our analysis of the first night of the 2013 Rose of Tralee, Olytico once again tracked and analysed the conversation around the hashtag ‘#roseoftralee’ and the phrase ‘Rose of Tralee’. The other common hashtag on the evening was ‘#rot’, but this term brought back large volumes of non-Rose related content, so it was omitted for the purpose of the following analysis.
Key numbers
Based on tweets published between 8pm and 11.35pm (duration of broadcast)
Total: 16,216 tweets
Peak of 330 tweets per minute – when the Texas Rose was announced as the winner
Top words included Texas and Sydney.
Minute by Minute
The graph below provides a minute by minute breakdown of tweets published during the show (click on the icon on the top right of the chart to view in full-screen):
Peak 1 – 9:54pm
The broadcast began at 8pm, with a break at 9pm for the news. However, it wasn’t until after the break that conversation levels started to significantly increase. It was the Dublin Rose, Clare Lennon – and in particular her comedy act – that caused the first peak of 146 tweets per minute at 9.54pm.
Peak 2 – 10:10pm
The Sydney Rose, Fiona O’Sullivan caused the next spike on Twitter, with the tweet rate rising to a peak of 143 tweets per minute at 10.10pm as she performed her version of Caledonia.
'sydney', 'poem' & 'caledonia' are now trending in Ireland http://t.co/lnn4sEU0a6
— Trendsmap Ireland (@TrendsIreland) August 20, 2013
Peak 3 – 10:50pm
The final Rose of the evening, Jessica Giggey, representing North Carolina, took to the stage, and her talent – rapping – caused the biggest spike of the evening, with a peak of 158 tweets per minute – and led some to reminisce about the Dublin Rose from 2011.
Get the Dublin Rose out to dance to the North Carolinas rapping – gwan, you know you wanna see it again #RoseOfTralee http://t.co/TFcFt4KUDA
— Lesley Robinson (@LesTunes) August 20, 2013
Peak 4 – 11:24pm
Haley O’Sullivan, the Texas Rose, is announced as the winner and within minutes the term Texas trends in Ireland. At its peak, the #roseoftralee hashtag hits 330 tweets per minute.
#texas is now trending in Ireland http://t.co/lnn4sEU0a6
— Trendsmap Ireland (@TrendsIreland) August 20, 2013
Word Cloud
When we remove the terms ‘Rose of Tralee’ and ‘#roseoftralee’ from the results, we’re left with the most commonly occurring words used yesterday evening:

Comparing the two nights
When we compare the two broadcasts, there was a total of 37,640 #roseoftralee tweets published across the two days. This figure does not include all the tweets published before and after the shows, and in the days leading up to the event.
When we look back at 2013, the Rose of Tralee will be one of the most engaged-with television programmes broadcast by RTÉ this year.