Yams Day By the Numbers

Frequency of Social Posts Tell the Story of A Concert

At Zero Slant, we use spikes in social media to tell the world’s stories. This is one simple example of the thousands of stories we analyze daily. Yams Day was a concert held Monday, January 18 at Terminal 5 in New York City to celebrate the life of A$AP Yams, who tragically died one year ago. This is what happened, understood only through mining the data about social posts at the venue.

People Start to Line Up — 5:30P ET

The first spike begins at 5:30pm. Since this is an evening concert, it would make sense that this is when people started to line up.

5:42pm — first confirmed image of line:

The Concert Begins — 9:30P ET

When we first looked at the graph, we thought we had messed up. There is a clear deceleration as the concert begins.

One would assume that there would be an increase in posts once the show began, but after doing some research, it appears that the majority of people were still stuck in line until well after 10pm. This was due to the venue not having a large enough security team checking entrants.

Here’s the line at 9:57pm:

If I had been waiting in line for three hours for a concert I knew had already begun, I’d be less excited — probably bummed out — and in turn be less likely to post until I got inside.

Here’s a reporter confirming how late people entered:

Main Act — 11:30P ET

Understandably so, the largest spike in acceleration happens when A$AP Mob gets on stage.

@mikeyfresh1 was live-tweeting his experience watching the concert livestream on Yahoo.com, and the timestamp clearly illustrates 11:30pm ET.

Zooming into our own graph at 11:30pm, you see how distinct the acceleration of posts is:

It’s also obvious that even after the group left the stage, people continued to post until around 2am the following morning. One trend we’ve found throughout all of our analysis is that a lot of people capture live content using their phones, then wait until after the event has concluded to share.

Everyone Goes To Sleep — 2A ET

Self explanatory:

The Next Morning — 7:30A ET

This is another trend we’ve found across all events. People wake up and they want to talk about last night’s experiences. The graph from Yams Day illustrates this very clearly with the posts beginning at 7:30am the following day and continuing throughout the afternoon.

Social Media Tells the Story

Tracking spikes in social media tells a very vivid picture of any event. There are documentaries being made of every human experience on social media. Social networks themselves simply aren’t effective at organizing and automatically displaying these stories. From here on out, we’ll be regularly walking our readers through events around the world using only Zero Slant’s analysis of social posts.

As always you can reach me at [email protected]