Twitter and the Tour de France

The next session at ECREA 2012 starts with my colleague Tim Highfield, presenting a paper on the Tour de France on Twitter which was co-authored with Stephen Harrington and myself. My notes on the session are below ; slides and audio will follow later. Tim's slides and audio.

The Tour is a global media event with a substantial social media audiences, and is watched for the sporting action, as an act of sports fandom, as well as as a media event in its own right; social media provides a central location for globally dispersed viewers to come together in a shared online space as they watch the event. The way these audiences frame the event may differ substantially, however.

There's been a fair amount of research into the intersection of sports and Twitter by now. Sports tweeting by sportspeople involves self-promotion and brand management, commentary on competitions and training, and interaction with other athletes as well as fans; Twitter makes visible the connections between various stakeholders in sports. It is also especially well suited for live tweeting alongside widely broadcast sporting events, and this is increasingly incorporated into the live coverage. The 140-character limitation of Twitter supports this live tweeting by privileging quick, short messages, and the use of hashtags enables the coming together of a wide ad hoc audience.

For this presentation, we tracked a number of race-specific hashtags (#tdf, #letour), keywords ("tour de france"), as well as the accounts of notable sports and media personalities. The 2012 tour took place during June and July 2012, involving some 198 riders and audiences in 120 countries, and it is likely that he majority of the tweets came from TV audiences rather than in-person spectators. We collected nearly 560,000 tweets from 145,000 users which used the #tdf hashtag, peaking on the final day, 22 July; there were 428,000 tweets from 224,000 users which used "tour de france", and 36,000 tweets from some 3,000 users using the Australia-specific hashtag #sbstdf.

Tweeting peaked on each day during the final moments of each stage; individual spikes in activity also happened on various key days in the overall progress of the tour. Networks of interaction between #tdf users are often showing nation-specific clustering (indicating the use of different languages), but are also linked by the accounts of specific riders (e.g. riding for a team of a different nationality than their own).

Tweeting at riders focusses on their key days during the tour, though Fabian Cancellara is mentioned most often a day aft he dropped out of the tour, when his wife had their baby; this also indicates a certain amount of personal fandom for the riders. In Australia, the #sbstdf hashtag also shows a substantial amount of humour designed to share watching the tour as a social experience; fake accounts for riders and broadcasters add to this sense of a shared television experience.