Are Trending Topics Useful for

Marketing?Visibility of Trending Topics vs

Traditional AdvertisementJuan Miguel CarrascosaRoberto GonzálezRubén CuevasArturo Azcorra

Motivation• Twitter is one of the most important

OSNs(+540M users, +340M tweets per day ).

• One of the main features offered in Twitter is the Trending Topics (TTs).

• It seems that TTs are being used in the context of advertisement and marketing.

• Lack of rigorous quantitative studies.

1. Do TTs offer more/less/similar visibility than traditional ads?

2. Marketing strategies are typically applied in a localized context (i.e., in a country). Then it is important to investigate whether TTs are a valid marketing tool for all countries or just for few of them.

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Goals

1. To Characterize the visibility offered by TTs across a large number of countries.

2. To Compare the visibility offered by TTs and advertisements in traditional media (e.g., newspaper ads or radio stations' commercials).

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Measurement MethodologyTwitter API• Twitter (List of TTs )

o Worldwide, 35 countries and 215 cities.

• Streaming and REST API (best effort nature)o Trending Topics Listo Tweets

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• Quantitative Metrics: o Number of Tweets.o Number of Users.

• Temporal Metrics:o Number of Active Periods: number of times a given TT appears in the top10

list.o Total active time: the total time a trend has been in the list of 10 Trending

Topics across one or multiples active periods.o Age: total time between the first time and the last time it was a Trending Topic

across one or multiple active periods.

9:00 – 9:10 10:10 – 10:30 11:30 – 12:00 time

# of tweets

# of Active Periods = 3

Total active time: 10 + 20 + 30 = 60 min.

Age: 9:00 – 12:00 (3 hours)

Measurement MethodologyTemporal Metrics

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1. Capable of accurately capture the visibility associated to TTs.2. To identify changes on the algorithm.

• WW-TT-2011 20 min • WW-TT-2012 10 min • WW-TT-2013 10 min

Measurement MethodologyAccuracy

Dec 2011: Twitter large system upgrade

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Visibility of Trending Topics across Countries

A first look at TTs visibility Net-Visibility Potential-Visibility Potential-online-visibility

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Visibility of TTsA first look at TTs (total active time)

High variability on total active time (20min US, 1000 min NZ)

Median Active Time:

LtV = 70minMtV = 350minHtV = 700 min

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Visibility of TTs: Metrics(Banner-blindnees)

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Visibility of TTs: Metrics

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Visibility of TTs: Metrics

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Visibility of TTs: MetricsIE

IE

NG

NG

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TTs vs Traditional Advertisement

Channels Background Comparative

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TTs vs Traditional Advertisement ChannelsBackground

GRP (Gross Rating Points): De facto metric used on traditional channels.

Problem: rely on the information provided by audiometers

There is a controversial debate regarding the suitability of GRP for advertisement in online media.

Our PV metric (contrary to GRP) does not need any special devices allows comparing the visibility of traditional and new types of advertisement channels.

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TTs vs Traditional Advertisement

ChannelsAssumptions:

α is equal to 1 because the ad uses all the bandwidth of the medium.

Newspaper: (25min 53 sec)• Eye-tracking: R. Pieters and M. Wedel

report that the average time that readers dedicate to an ad in newspapers is 17.26s.

Radio: (1080 min)• Duration of radio-stations’ commercials of

60 seconds.• Aggressive campaign in which the ad is

played 12 times a day.

Results:- Radio: IE, FR, DE, ES

and UK- Twitter: CA, CO, NZ

and US.- Newspapers: GT

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Visibility of TTs within a Country

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• Developing a semantic tool:o DBpediao IMDbo Self-defined categories:

Handful set of meaningful semantic

classes

Visibility of TTs within a Country

Semantic

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Hashtags Different Behaviour

depending on the country.

Visibility of TTs within a Country

Semantic

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Conclusions“Trending Topics present a comparable visibility to other traditional advertisement channels and thus they can be considered a useful tool in marketing and advertisement contexts.

However, the high variability on the visibility offered by Trending Topics across (and within) countries suggests that we should apply the described methodology to obtain accurate results for each specific case.”

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Questions

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