Music Trumps Sports on Twitter: ESPYs vs. BET Awards

Last night, ESPN hosted its annual ESPY awards, an event that always draws significant social media buzz across the country.  We tracked Twitter mentions of the hashtags #ESPY and #ESPYs, much like we did for the #BETawards last month.  When comparing the two data sets, a few things drew our attention.  For one, the amount of Twitter buzz varied immensely between the two shows.   The BET Awards garnered over 168,000 tweets during the event, while the ESPYs drew only 18,000+ tweets.  Such data suggests that the BET Awards, and music in general, are of greater importance to the Twitter world than the ESPYs and sports.

Another discrepancy in our data sets was the cities that were most active on Twitter about the events.  For the BET Awards, we saw musically rich cities like New York City and Atlanta dominate the Twitter buzz, but for the ESPYs, they were less involved.  On the contrary, cities like Boston and Los Angeles, seemingly more interested in their local sports than their local music, were much more active during the ESPYs.

• Posted on July 15, 2010 by Adam Schoenfeld
• Categories: Events, Sports