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Why your little music festival isn’t trending in Twitter

By Tim Duke ⋅ May 22, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

As SXSW rolled through Austin this year, a number of people have been baffled by the fact that it wasn’t a trending topic—despite the fact that Twitter first became popular at SXSW a few years ago. The fact that it didn’t become a trending topic really shouldn’t be surprising. Lets do some basic math to figure out why…

It’s estimated that SXSW draws a week-long crowd of roughly 150k people and maybe 3x that many people are following it around the world (or commenting about it online). So you’re looking at an audience of around 500k people paying attention to the festival in some way. That’s a big number.

Now it’s safe to assume a significant number of SXSW goers are tech-savy and have Twitter accounts, so we’ll just stick with saying there are at least 250k active Twitter accounts and are tweeting about SXSW.

Of these 250k SXSW related Twitter accounts, in order for SXSW to become a trending topic, we have two basic requirements:

The tweet must be Public.
The tweet must contain “SXSW”

Based on the fact that SXSW is a huge event, and with hundreds of mini-events happening simultaneously across the city, we’re more likely to see a smattering of sxsw ‘related’ tweets, that don’t actually contain the SXSW letters.

Example: (”OMG, Bill Murray is bar-tending at Shangri-La! This week is crazy!”) — that did happen.

Yes, adding the hashtag #sxsw would have included it in our Trending Topic mission. But the reality is, not every Twitter user is thinking like an SEO expert and making sure their tweets are being indexed by Twitter for popular search terms. We have to accept the fact that there’s a lot more tweets flying through the system related to SXSW, but they won’t actually be tagged as such.

Now let’s consider that the festival is a week long, and event’s are happening from dawn til … the next dawn. This gives our 250k Twitter users a giant window to publish their SXSW tweets. They aren’t all happening within a short time frame. (say, the few minutes just after a season finale of some big TV show).

Ok, but big stuff does happen at SXSW

Sure, there might be 5k people packed into a venue to catch a “secret” Kanye West or Metallica show. But even if the entire audience picked up their phone and gave the perfectly crafted ‘SXSW tweet’ at once, it’s only 5k people. And they would have to have a huge follower base that’s interested in retweeting the info for the ball to start rolling towards Trending.

If we take our 250k SXSW Twitter accounts and consider a few things:

Not every tweet will contain ‘SXSW’
They tweet at various times throughout the week
The tweets aren’t about the same subject, because so much is happening.
Even the most popular events of the festival only have 5-10k people attending.

Then we start to see that there really AREN’T that many people simultaneously talking about SXSW at one moment.

Now let’s look at the rest of the Twitterverse

There are roughly 75 MILLION registered twitter accounts, sending out roughly 50 MILLION tweets daily. Even if a large segment of those 75 million are ’sleepers’ and don’t use the service, 50 million tweets a day is alot to compete with.

And when a topic starts trending, it’s usually major media events that either started on TV (ie, OMG that episode of Lost was the dumbz!) or are about to hit major TV coverage (ie, OMG, earthquake!).

The key thing to notice is that these are giant events that are triggered at one specific instant and get people talking world-wide. After the topic becomes trending, it usually suffers from the snowball affect of people talking about the fact that it’s a trending topic. … and then the spammers begin. You know the ones that simply tweet every single trending topic at once, just to get attention. But we’ll ignore them, as they should be.

What about Local Trending Topics, DUH!

Twitter has slowly been adding different cities to the Local Trends list over the last year. And it’s not surprising Austin isn’t on the list yet (we are a city of only a million people, after all.) There was hope Austin would get some early exposure because of it’s ties to making Twitter popular, and the size of the tech / social media savvy crowd. And maybe Austin isn’t far down the list of receiving ‘the local trends.’

The local trends can be somewhat helpful, and I’d expect SXSW or ACL to show up on a Local Trends list without a problem.

Of course, an easy solution if you’re trying to find out what’s happening in your area is to get nerdy with Advanced Twitter Search. Just set your location and a small radius and then start checking various search terms around the subject you’re interested in. I do this all the time.

ex: Search: “fire” near:78701 within:1mile

It’s a quick way to get an idea of what’s happening in an area. I’d expect this would be a great tool for journalist to start scooping stories. But this is spilling into another blog post idea.

The bottom line is that with the major Trending Topics millions of people are quickly talking about one subject at one specific moment. That’s a lot to compete with, when you consider the fragmented and comparatively tiny audience of SXSW, ACL, Coachella, Sasquatch, Lollapalooza, or whatever other festival you fancy.