Twitter TWTR +0.86% offers something that no other social network does: a glimpse into the mind of real people. Despite the fact that the audience is no doubt skewed to certain age groups and other demographics, it’s still capable of producing an amazing insight into what people are thinking about.
I recently started talking to a company called Spredfast. You might not have heard of them, but I promise you’ve seen content on your TV that was derived from its broadcast platform. The firm deals with social media for huge companies, and provides live Tweeting services to TV companies that want to connect with their audience during event broadcasts. The firm is interesting because it has access to the Twitter River, which is the master feed of everything that is happening on the social network, in real time. Access to the River is not easy to get, and is a level above what API access gives you. What it means though, is that Spredfast has insights that other companies do not.
So, I asked Spredfast if it would take a look at what people were talking about on Twitter around Apple's AAPL +2.94% initial iPhone announcement, then the first weekend of availability, and the initial news that the iPhone 6 Plus was getting bent in some pockets. The results are interesting, and I think worth sharing.
The Apple Watch wasn't the most discussed product during the Apple launch event - photo:
The first thing that really surprised me was that the number one discussion on Twitter wasn’t about the Apple Watch, but the iPhone 6. Spredfast tracked more than 1 million mentions of the iPhone 6, but only 336,000 around the watch. Most watch-related chatter was about the battery life, which Apple didn’t mention on stage. Also heavy on discussion was the new camera, which garnered around 17,000 mentions and the larger size which received 22,000 tweets.
My favourite stat from the launch though is that 38 per cent of all reaction was positive, with only 2 per cent was negative. The remaining percentage was presumably content that had no discernible opinion either way.
Other interesting stats were that 80 per cent of tweets about the launch were in English, 14 per cent were in Spanish leaving just 6 per cent in other languages. Spredfast also revealed that Tim Cook’s tweet sent from his iPhone 6, backstage, got 24,000 retweets pretty much straight away.
Interest in the iPhone grew massively on Friday 19th, when there were a staggering 4 million tweets, peaking at 2pm central time. The top celebrities tweeting included Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, Snoop Dogg and Conan O’Brien. Most people were talking about the screen size, how much larger the phone was and how quick the new handset is.
Gold is by far the most talked about colour - image:
Gold is by far the most popular colour for iPhone Tweeters with 65.2 per cent of all mentions, followed by Space Gray (22.71 per cent) and White (12.09 per cent).
Then, when #BendGate started trending on Twitter, things got frantic again for a while. So when it all started, I asked Spredfast if it could provide me with some insights. What I got back was really interesting. For one thing, the sentiment around the incident wasn’t especially negative. People were talking about it, but no one was really mad about the situation. This holds true with the figure announced today that so far just nine people have officially complained about their phones bending.
Related tags that were part of the discussion were #iPhone6, #Apple, “skinny jeans”, #bendghazi. By 11:30 CST on the morning of #BendGate there had been 26,000 mentions tracked and the term was trending Worldwide as well as being highly-discussed in the US and UK too.
People talked a lot about #BenGate, but there wasn't a lot of anger - image: Unbox Therapy via YouTube
So there you have it, Twitter use gives some amazing facts about how people have reacted to the biggest phone launch of the year, and, in spite of the whirl of publicity around #BendGate, it seems like most people aren’t too worried about it. Perhaps that will change if more handsets are affected.
A big thank you to Spredfast for its help gathering this data, please let me know via the comments if you have questions, and I’ll certainly try and get them answered.
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