CCI Research & Innovation Center

Homecoming 2018 takes shape on Twitter

Posted by Brandon Boatwright

Homecoming 2018 is only a few days away, and we’re already seeing Vols from all over the country tweeting about the big day. Over the last seven days alone, we’ve seen nearly 500 posts about the upcoming weekend. Don’t forget to check out all of the festivities that will be happening if you’re going to be in town.

If you can’t make it, we invite you to join in on the social media conversation to at least feel a little closer to Rocky Top!

Speaking of – a quick peak at the top words shows us that folks are already gearing up for the upcoming football game.

Many of the words appearing in the word cloud are the result of a single tweet from @Vol_Football outlining some of the key facts about the weekend.

There’s also a lot of chatter about VFL Inky Johnson (@Inkyjonhson) coming back to Rocky Top as the grand marshal for homecoming this year.

We’re unrolling a new wrinkle in our blog this week using Social Studio data. By pulling all of the mentions about UT Homecoming, we used Gephi (a network analysis tool) to map out what the conversation looks like. In the image below, you’ll see three distinct clusters, each representing topics people are discussing about Homecoming.

The green cluster represents the number of users who are talking about Inky Johnson coming home to serve as grand marshal. The pink cluster reflects the number of tweets and retweets directed at the UT Knoxville Alumni account. Finally, the blue cluster shows the structure of the network mentioning @Vol_Football.

Gephi provides us with an additional tool to utilize the data we are able to gather using Social Studio. We can’t think of a cooler topic to analyze than UT Homecoming, so we’re going to follow up on this next week to show you what the conversation looked like over the weekend.

So, your mission (if you choose to accept it) is to tweet about Homecoming this weekend and check back with us next Thursday as we update the network visualization. Who knows? Maybe there will be a cluster around your Twitter handle.

Either way, Go Vols and Happy Homecoming!