Pope Benedict XVI is well renowned as one of the most powerful and influential individuals in the world. Yesterday marked a momentous occasion, the Pope’s first tweet. Now as you can expect, we saw a huge uprising in content populating regarding this event, but really what were the impacts?
To preface: we took a look at the volume of conversation around L’Osservatore Romano‘s twitter handle to understand the change impacted by yesterdays tweet.
Over a 6 month time period we had Romano’s account coming up in a search around 87 times per week. On average there was 1 blog and 1.5 news posts written per week as well. Relatively modest numbers, but still numbers at that.
Taking a look just at content from yesterday mentioning Romano’s twitter account we see a 3838% rise in content on a weekly basis (Yesterday alone there were over 3340 tweets.) That over doubles the entire last 6 months worth of content. Not only that, but the next highest day of tweets in this range topped at 145 tweets when the beatification of Pope Jean Paul II took place in the beginning of May. We saw with the 3340 tweets yesterday, over 6.5 million twitter handles received some type of notification regarding the Pope’s tweet. For only 140 characters, that’s power, and clearly not just in the space of twitter.
Now this permeated across both blogs and traditional media outlets where we saw a 8500% and 4866% rise respectively on a weekly basis. (85 Blogs and 73 News posts in a single day!) This for us highlights the power that twitter has built in the space of sharing information and creating interest. Pretty impressive for one tweet if you ask us.
Some other points of interest would be that the United States had by far and large the lions share of the conversation taking place, with about 33.6% share of voice. This is over 3 times the next closest countries in terms of volume and uptake (Countries placing second and third were the U.K. and Brazil respectively). Furthermore, we saw the majority of the conversation being picked up by males. (66/34 split of conversation over the past day.)
The statistics don’t lie. They actually affirm some assumptions that many Pope supporters have promoted for a long time. The interest level of the Pope rivals that of a Justin Bieber or a Lady Gaga in todays age. Even with a single tweet we have tracked uptake numbers that rarely exist regarding a single person (We find events have a much larger uptake in conversations then people do!).
The questions we’re still asking ourselves: Will he tweet again? If so will the impact be greater/smaller? Was the impact this time around simply the awe of a religious leader embracing Social Media?
Current Hunches: Yes, Smaller, and Absolutely. Let us know what you think!
