What was the most talked about subject on
Twitter
in 2014? Believe it or not, in terms of time "trending" on Twitter, it's the Xbox - presumably mostly the One, and the various issues it's had this year. Social marketing platform Spredfast has taken a look at the year's tweets, and has put an actual number to the amount of time spent on each topic. Essentially, the number is the amount of minutes, hours or days a topic was discussed for, in total.
Microsoft's
Xbox managed to accrue a total of 913 days of trending time over the year, with the iPhone 6 getting 432 days and iOS 8 managing 254 days of total tweeting time. In total, those three products dominated with 1600 days used up in mentions. The other big hitter was, wait for it: #ChickenFriesAreBack which captured the imagination of the US gathering up 158 days. I had to look that up, but it's a food that Burger King sells, apparently. It's fairly interesting to see that tech in one form or another dominated, that said it's likely that discussions around Xbox and iOS 8 weren't entirely positive, given the problems with those products.
Amid the inevitable talk about celebrities, the nice surprise was that amid 374 days talking about Taylor Swift, the Tweeters also managed to find 212 days to remember Harold Ramis the writer, director and actor who passed away in February.
There was also some interesting stats about the biggest brands in the US. Dominating Twitter was Taco Bell, which is almost certainly because it has a very lively social media team who aren't afraid to take some risks with their tweets. Mention Taco Bell and there's a good chance you'll get a funny reply back, if your message warrants it. This sort of thing gives the firm a great boost to their brand buzz, and other could learn from it. For its efforts, Taco Bell had the public talking for 4140 days in total.
Starbucks
, Walmart, Waffle House and Burger King also did well for traditional retail outlets on social media. Starbucks was the clear leader at 3695 days of talking, Walmart earned 3358 days of conversation while Waffle House managed 1963 days, which is far more impressive than Burger King's measly 59 days.
Netflix
was another brand that dominated Twitter, and is another company that works quite hard at social media, and engages with its customers and often retweets positive feedback about its shows. The firm managed 2582 hours of social coverage, and no doubt a decent amount of that total came down to the events of House of Cards season 2.
Across the US there was proof that Americans are a positive and happy bunch, #ImHappyBecause got a lot of people talking, with a collective 205 days while the month or so of prime #ALSIceBucketChallenge Tweeting managed 162 total days.
In the "blink and you miss it" category are Donnie Wahlberg, who managed to inspire just 11 seconds of total conversation, and surprisingly the Star Wars "X-Wing" mentions only created 10 seconds of excitement.
Edit: an earlier version of this post credited the wrong company. I'm blaming it on a long year...
