Yesterday Mark Grace and Daron Sutton (CORRECTION: Todd Walsh set up and conducted the interview) managed to get Senator John McCain to endorse Mark Reynolds bid to be the MLB All Star Game Final Vote winner for the National League.
For reference, Senator McCain sent this tweet out at approximately 4pm Pacific (1600). All times in the analysis below are Pacific.
Today @MLB wondered… did McCain’s tweet have any measurable impact?
Well I happen to be tracking all things Diamondbacks using justSignal – my solution for helping businesses both engage and learn from their fans via Social Media (drop me a note if you are interested in signing up). So let’s take a look at the data and see what we can see…
First some background. justSignal collects every Tweet (and YouTube video, Flickr photo, Blog Post and Backtype Blog Comment) about the Dbacks. We cache all this data for 30 days (when you sign up have the ability to download all the data and store it in your own database). So we have 30 days worth of Social Media data stored for this analysis.
The average Tweets per Day for the last 30 days is 334, but to really determine how yesterday (July 7th, 2009) compares let’s take a look at the daily average number of tweets for the last 30 days:
We can see that yesterday (July 7th, 2009) had a much higher than average number of tweets. As a matter of fact, it is the second highest number of tweets in the last 30 days – only surpassed by June 9th (I really need to go check out that day and see what happened).
We, however, are looking for any specific change in the data as a result of McCain’s tweet… so let’s dig deeper.
Here is the average number of Tweets per Hour of day as measured over the last 30 days:
Pretty clear pattern – the number of tweets ramps up a bit before game time and peaks around the end of the game. The ramp is pretty smooth.
Now lets look at the Tweets per hour for yesterday (July 7th, 2009):
The first thing we notice is a marked jump in Tweet volume the hour after Senator McCain’s Tweet (1700 Pacific). The average 1600/1700 hours are 19.8 and 21.7 respectively. Yesterday however, we saw a jump from 18 to 45 in the same period. We also see that the peak number of tweets per hour (83) is well above average. The question is, are these levels unprecedented – or simply normal variations from the average?
When we review hours 16 and 17 over the 30 day period we see several other examples of large jumps. For example, on June 13th the values for hours 16 and 17 were 19 and 38 respectively. On June 16th the values went from 10 to 38. Given those examples I think it is safe to say the volume change yesterday isn’t extraordinary.
The peak hour Tweets – 83 in hour 21 – is also not extraordinary in the sample. For example, on June 12th in hour 20 there were 73 Tweets. On June 30th in hour 17 there were 85 Tweets.
One last statistic… in the last 30 days there are only 26 tweets that mention Senator McCain and the Diamondbacks. Two on June 8th, one on June 9th, 15 on July 7th and 8 so far today.
Given that Senator McCain has nearly 1 million followers I think it is safe to say his endorsement of Mark Reynolds had essentially no impact.
I’d love to tell you Senator McCain’s endorsement was enough to put Mark in the all star game… but that isn’t going to get it done.
Cmon Dbacks Fans!!!!
