Social media — especially the immediate, back-and-forth conversations of Twitter — can reflect the issues most on peoples' minds. For Raleigh, that included the Golden Globes and college football’s biggest game.
Hoodline sifted through a week’s worth of the city’s loud and chaotic stream of tweets and figured out what really has you talking (or rather, typing).
But first, the numbers. Twitter users whose profiles place them in Raleigh generated 362,056 tweets and retweets between Jan. 7 and Jan. 13. Daily tweets ranged from a high of 56,311 on Jan. 9 down to 47,283 on Jan. 12.
Part of the chatter was locals taking part in national trending conversations, based on Twitter’s list of trending terms and tags for the week. Two of those in particular drew the attention of Raleigh tweeters: #GoldenGlobes and #NationalChampionship.
The Golden Globes honored actor and comedian Carol Burnett with a special achievement award, prompting @ReneeDeLuca to tweet:
So many wonderful memories of watching Carol Burnett's comedy as I was growing up. #GoldenGlobes2019
— RenéeDeLuca (@ReneeDeLuca) January 7, 2019
After Clemson dismantled Alabama in the NCAA national championship game, @DrMBartlett tweeted:
Thank you for a perfect season!@ClemsonTigers @ClemsonFB @ClemsonUniv @ClemsonTigerNet #NationalChampionship2019 #NationalChampions pic.twitter.com/e6G7W3404H
— Dr Michelle Bartlett (@DrMBartlett) January 8, 2019
The city also saw dozens of hashtags arise locally during the week. Most of them didn’t gain much traction (that’s typical), but three that did were #NCPol (572 local tweets), #GoPack (473 local tweets) and #TakeWarning (464 local tweets).
The #ncpol hashtag tracks state politics news, including continuing questions about a lawmaker's contact with regulators. WRAL's state capitol bureau, @NCCapitol, tweeted its coverage:
Chicken plant deal again sparking questions for #NCGA speaker of the house #ncpol https://t.co/nSSGYDsew3
— WRAL Gov't Coverage (@NCCapitol) January 11, 2019
Hopes rose high and then fell among Wolfpack fans after a 90-82 loss to No. 13 UNC on Jan. 8. @Andrew_Brown22 summed it up like this:
No shame in losing to a good basketball team. We got a lot of season left. Proud of our guys!!#GoPack
— Andrew Brown (@Andrew_Brown22) January 9, 2019
Commenting on the Carolina Hurricanes' 4-3 win over the NY Islanders Jan. 8, @CanesAndCoffee tweeted:
Ironically, most impressive about #Canes win was fact that they really never got going but found a way to grind out a win. Other than late softie, goaltending was again a positive and depth stepped up and led way. #TakeWarning
— Canes and Coffee (@CanesandCoffee) January 9, 2019
Most of the city’s Twitter conversations happen without hashtags, so Hoodline also applied our analytical tools to the text of all 362,000 tweets to surface more of what was on your mind.
The word cloud shows the relative frequency of the top 50 terms from tweets originating in Raleigh during the week. No. 1 was “People,” appearing 8,474 times. Other top words included “Trump” at 5,681, “wall” at 3,198 and “God,” 2,468.
To take the temperature on social media each week, we collect all tweets from Raleigh-based Twitter users and those tweets tagged with locations in the city, then apply our own complex analytical tools to refine the flood of tweets into a coherent analysis of the city’s week on social media.
There’s a lot of data behind our story, but it doesn’t include absolutely everything. We have, for example, cooked up ways to screen out offensive tweets, and we’ve taken steps to reduce the noise from bots and fake accounts.
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