1. Are Trending Topics Useful for Marketing? Visibility of Trending Topics vs Traditional Advertisement Juan Miguel Carrascosa Roberto González Rubén Cuevas Arturo Azcorra

2. 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. 2

3. 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). 3

4. Measurement Methodology Twitter API Twitter ( List of TTs ) o Worldwide, 35 countries and 215 cities. Streaming and REST API (best effort nature) o Trending Topics List o Tweets 4

5. 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 – 9:1010:10 – 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 Methodology Temporal Metrics 5

6. 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 Methodology Accuracy Dec 2011: Twitter large system upgrade 6

7. Visibility of Trending Topics across Countries  A first look at TTs visibility  Net-Visibility  Potential-Visibility  Potential-online-visibility 7

8. Visibility of TTs A first look at TTs (total active time) High variability on total active time (20min US, 1000 min NZ) Median Active Time: LtV = 70min MtV = 350min HtV = 700 min 8

9. Visibility of TTs : Metrics (Banner-blindnees) 9

10. Visibility of TTs : Metrics 10

11. Visibility of TTs : Metrics 11

12. Visibility of TTs : Metrics IE NG 12

13. TTs vs Traditional Advertisement Channels  Background  Comparative 13

14. TTs vs Traditional Advertisement Channels Background 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. 14

15. TTs vs Traditional Advertisement Channels Assumptions: 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 15

16. Visibility of TTs within a Country 16

17. Developing a semantic tool: o DBpedia o IMDb o Self-defined categories: Handful set of meaningful semantic classes Visibility of TTs within a Country Semantic 17

18.  Hashtags  Different Behaviour depending on the country. Visibility of TTs within a Country Semantic 18

19. 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.” 19

20. Questions 20