CNN hosted and broadcast the debate, and before the program started, they made it clear this event was social by design. The network’s Washington, DC, bureau chief stated that relevant posts from Facebook, Twitter and CNN.com would be used in the on-air debate.
The official hashtag for the debate was #CNNDebate. Without question, the promotion and management of this hashtag was a huge success.By around 9 p.m. Eastern Time, that term was the top non-promoted trending topic worldwide on Twitter. Users were live-tweeting the debate adding to the conversations their own thoughts, opinions and questions. A few high-profile Twitter users such as journalist Anderson Cooper were even tweeting behind-the-scenes pictures and video from the New Hampshire debate hall.
We turned to Trendistic to see just how many tweets were about the debate. An hour and a half into the debate, the official hashtag appeared in nearly 1.5% of all tweets published across the service — that’s a staggeringly high figure.
By contrast, use of the term “Republican” peaked at around .13% of tweets, and the terms “GOP” and “debate” each peaked at under .5% of all tweets published during the debate.
However, in trying to analyze the sentiments expressed around the debate, we’re at a bit of a loss. Most natural language processing Twitter tools are still rather crude. Some of them pegged positive sentiment on the hashtag #CNNDebate at around 66%; however, the majority of the “positive” tweets were deeply sarcastic. For example, one typical and supposedly positive tweet reads, “Don’t know who won but I think we can all agree America was the loser tonight #CNNdebate.”
Stay tuned for more info on how each Republican debater performed on Facebook.
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