We've been tracking the White House's social media presence in full detail using ThinkUp for more than a year, which lets us give you a unique look at how real people are responding to @whitehouse on Twitter during this evening's State of the Union speech.
These charts and data points also compare this year's activity to last year's State of the Union, since we have the ThinkUp data set from 2011 as well. (Note: The White House added their @whlive account since the last State of the Union, and since they've split their activity between both accounts, we combine them here for an apples-to-apples comparison between 2012 and 2011.)
In less than two hours, we captured 20,787 individual messages during the speech, and we're making that data available in its raw form here for further analysis.
Facts
- 6,263 unique people mentioned @whitehouse or @whlive in 20,787 total tweets, a 28% increase over last year's activity
- 14,175 tweets mentioned @whitehouse alone, nearly matching its mentions from 14,879 mentions from last year
- At its peak, Twitter users were mentioning @whitehouse and @whlive at a rate of over 530 tweets per minute
- 10,248 (about 49%) of the messages used the #sotu hashtag
- Like last year, the biggest peak came at the end of the speech at 10:16pm EST
Most Retweeted
All but one of the top ten most retweeted posts during the State of the Union came from the @whitehouse account. It's an interesting glimpse at what resonated with people.
| Retweets | Post | Source |
| 784 | Obama: I believe what Repub...Lincoln believed...gov't should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves & no more #SOTU | whitehouse |
| 764 | Obama: if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98% of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up...You’re the ones who need relief #SOTU | whitehouse |
| 627 | Obama: we should support...every risk-taker & entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs. #SOTU http://t.co/D0GkbJdz | whitehouse |
| 517 | Obama: For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country. #SOTU http://t.co/wD1abq1H | whitehouse |
| 483 | Obama: Above all, our freedom endures because of the men and women in uniform who defend it. #SOTU | whitehouse |
| 453 | Obama: I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right now...nothing will get done ...because Washington is broken. #SOTU | whitehouse |
| 450 | Obama: What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them #SOTU | whitehouse |
| 443 | Obama: This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team. #SOTU | whitehouse |
| 439 | Obama: As long as we’re joined in common purpose...our future is hopeful & the state of our union will always be strong #SOTU | whitehouse |
| 362 | Obama: When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one nation, leaving no one behind. #SOTU | WHLive |
Top Terms
A simple look at word frequency of all the replies, excluding retweets and usernames, shows the terms people were using when mentioning @whitehouse and @whlive. "Work," "jobs," "tax," "business," "please," and "believe" all surface in the top 100.
Download the Data
Want to use the data we captured for your own analysis? Browse it on Google Spreadsheets, or download as an Excel spreadsheet or comma-separated text file.
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