Category Archives: Tweetdown

Tweetdown: Sean Hannity vs. Rachel Maddow

Posted on by

Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow square off against each other at the 9pm slot on cable. Both are active on Twitter, with Sean having 293,137 followers and Rachel having 2,064,375 — about 7 times as many.  So who gets mentioned the most on Twitter?  Would you bet Rachel does?

I did a count of all tweets mentioning either one of them throughout the day of 3/19/2012 (eastern time), and here’s the results:

Sean Hannity definitely benefits from having both a radio show as well as a TV show.  According to Wikipedia, Rachel’s last Air America radio show was in January 2010, and so she only has the TV show to drive Twitter participation.

Still, given the large follower advantage that Rachel has, it’s surprising that Sean’s followers still generate nearly twice the activity!

Weekend Tweetdown: #WarOnWomen vs. #250gas

Posted on by

The use of hash tags in twitter is a way of indicating a the topic of the tweet.  They are informal, and come into existence and then disappear at the whim of the users.

Two hashtags that were active this weekend were #waronwomen, to protest the attempts to put controls on contraception, abortion, and other women’s issues, and #250gas, which is New Gingrich’s hash tag for his promise to lower the price of gas to $2.50.

So how’d they do? Let’s see an hour-by-hour (EDT) breakdown over the weekend:

For the most part, the #waronwomen was ahead of #250gas.  But, at two points during the weekend, New Gingrich took to twitter to ask his supporters to retweet #250gas.  That caused the two spikes you see at Saturday at 2pm (hour 14) and Sunday at 7pm (hour 19).

At the end of the weekend, the Tweetdown score is #WarOnWomen, 4816 tweets, #250gas, 4237 tweets.

The #WarOnWomen wins the battle over #250gas!