State of the Nation: Social media numbers unpacked

Social media is playing an increasingly prominent role for political leaders, especially when it comes time for their annual State of the Nation address.

US president Barack Obama hosted a hangout on Google+ in the wake of his recent State of the Union address and South African president Jacob Zuma invited the people of his country to send in their questions via Twitter and Facebook ahead of his annual address.

Social media isn’t, however, only useful before a major presidential address. It can also provide some great insights about what people have been talking about and when they were talking about it.

President Zuma’s address which took place last night is a great case in point. Online strategy firm Acceleration Media has put together some interesting numbers on the speech.

The company’s online reputation management (ORM) tool pulled its data by tracking the keywords: State of the nation, Jacob Zuma, sona, opening of parliament, sotn, and sotnundress. All together it tracked around 40 000 posts, the majority of which were on Twitter.

When:
Unsurprisingly, social media traffic peaked between 19:00 and 20:00 with 13 389 posts. This was the hour which would have contained the core elements of the speech.

As the speech wound down, traffic began to decrease with 8 024 posts between 20:00 and 21:00.

After 21:00, there was there was a sharp decline in traffic, sinking to almost zero in the early hours of the morning.

Posts have, however, picked up as South Africans begin to wake up and comment on the speech in mainstream media are shared.

What:

Given the speech’s heavy focus on industrialisation and upcoming infrastructure projects, it’s unsurprising that a fair amount of the chatter was around it (970 posts) and job creation (870 posts).

Outstripping any serious chatter, however, was popular radio personality Gareth Cliff’s , State of the Nation Undress campaign, which had received 2 258 mentions by 7am.

The fact that Twitter was the predominant platform for the chatter is the fact that the hashtag #sona had the most mentions of all, with 17 586 by 7am.

Sentiment:
The vast majority of the posts — around 88% — have been neutral. Positive and negative posts make up the rest of the sentiment at 6.1% and 5.4% respectively.