24-02-2014

Almawave: the final results of the "Social Analysis Sanremo 2014" survey monitoring Twitter chatter about the Italian Song Festival

Over 1 million tweets recorded, although the number was down compared to the first evening of the show, in line with the viewing trends. For the second year running the social networks foresee the winner of the Festival: Arisa the most tweeted-about singer (16.1%) during the week. Marco Mengoni the most tweeted-about guest.

Rome, 24 February 2014 - Almawave, AlmavivA Group’s innovation company, has presented the final results of the Social Analysis of Sanremo 2014 survey, conducted to provide a real-time insight into the social network sentiment – of Twitter users in particular – on the Sanremo Song Festival.

A total of 1,162,370 Festival-themed tweets were analyzed during the week of the show, from the first evening onwards: a volume of social interactions that confirms the growing importance of the so-called second screen, namely the progressive integration between conventional television viewing and Twitter, the second screen on which to comment on television content and develop interactions between users regarding the content.

The number of tweets, however, featured a declining trend, consistently with the viewing trend, after the huge figures recorded on the first evening, about 320,000 tweets, equal to about double the number of tweets recorded on each of the following evenings. Saturday's final too totaled only 153,813 tweets, significantly down compared to the 247,349 tweets exchanged in the 2013 edition of the show.

However, for the second year running, the Twittersphere managed to foresee the final outcome of the contest: before the final went on air, in fact, Arisa was the most popular heavyweight singer, in terms of the online buzz.

A result which Arisa then obviously confirmed and strengthened, after her victory on Saturday evening, topping the league table for number of social interactions (16.1%, followed by Noemi (15.1%) and Francesco Renga (10.1%). Raphael Gualazzi came fourth, Renzo Rubino fifth and Giusy Ferreri sixth.

Arisa, however, could not beat Giusy Ferreri for number of Twitter followers, ranking second with 226,865 followers (up by 5,759 from the beginning of the Festival), compared to Ferreri's 315,197 followers.

Among the Italian guests, the most tweeted about were Marco Mengoni (14.2%), followed by Claudio Baglioni (12.8%), Renzo Arbore (12.7%), Raffaella Carrà (12.5%) and then all the others. Laetitia Casta was the most tweeted-about international guest (30.7%), followed by Rufus Wainwright and Cat Stevens.

The Almawave survey - carried out in partnership with the Ugo Bordoni Foundation - aimed to pick up the buzz in the social media world about Italy’s most popular TV program, as part of a broader joint project for the development of cutting-edge innovative solutions in this field.

Social Analysis Sanremo 2014 focuses on the chatter in Twitter about the presenters, the singers and the guest stars (based on mentions, hashtags, related terms), and analyses the sentiment about the characters and the topics of the Festival, through a statistical estimate of the tweets with a positive, negative or neutral opinion.

The survey was conducted by continuously collecting tweets in real time from 7 o'clock on 18 February until 7 o'clock on 23 February, with the near-real-time processing of the results.