#TheYearInNews 2015

Social media conversation is an amazing window into the world of news. Not only are we able to use it to quantify the level of conversation around any story or topic — and thus get a directional sense of broader public interest— but we’re able to understand how stories move amongst certain audiences, and who talked the most about what.

Today, we’re presenting our second annual Year In News, summarizing all U.S. Twitter conversation about the biggest stories of 2015. Powered by the Optimized Listening social analytics platform, we analyzed an estimated 459.9 million Twitter mentions across more than 150 trending topics and issues. To give you a sense of which stories moved where, we also broke down the conversation by week and for the year amongst three key audiences: the influential Beltway elites (as measured by a network analysis, described here), and samples of conservative and liberal activists on Twitter.

Excluding perennial subjects of conversation — like President Obama (who received 55 million mentions), and the Republican and Democratic parties, the most discussed person or issue in the news this year was Donald Trump, with 43 million U.S. mentions, followed by Hillary Clinton, with 31.5 million. Here’s the top 10:

1. Donald Trump: 43.0 million
2. Hillary Clinton: 31.5 million
3. Iraq & ISIS: 24.0 million
4. Bernie Sanders: 19.2 million
5. #BlackLivesMatter: 15.0 million
6. Iran: 14.8 million
7. Freddie Gray: 13.1 million
8. Jeb Bush: 12.5 million
9. Guns: 11.8 million
10. Abortion & Planned Parenthood: 11.2 million

A list like this tends to show us issues that were popular throughout the year, with issues that accumulate mentions over time. But what were the highest spikes? Which stories shocked — or moved — us the most? The leader here is the Paris attacks, which saw 8.9 million U.S. tweets in the days following the attacks. Here are the top 5, ranked by mentions during the weeks the story dominated the news cycle:

1. The Paris attacks, Nov. 8–15: 8.9 million
2. Freddie Gray & Baltimore, Apr. 26-May 3: 7.1 million
3. Donald Trump & Muslim immigration, Dec. 6: 5.0 million
4. The Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage nationwide, Jun. 21: 4.9 million
5. The Charleston shooting, Jun. 14: 3.2 million

Breaking out volume across all topics by day also makes these peaks stand out even more, and reinforces for us just how rare it is for a story to truly stand out, and also how important televised events, like the debates of the State of the Union, are in driving conversation and ultimately opinion:

From late July forward, Donald Trump dominated the vast majority of news cycles on Twitter, losing the title of most-mentioned for just a handful of weeks across all audiences. We were wondering what 2015 would have looked like if he hadn’t decided to run. What stories or issues would have dominated our attention instead? So, we re-built our chart showing the #1 story by week across audiences without Trump. Here’s what it looks like:

Without Trump, Hillary Clinton would have been the #1 story of the year — driven largely by conservative Twitter users and Beltway elites. Bernie Sanders would have led the conversation amongst liberals. This reminds us that simply because someone is often mentioned on Twitter, it doesn’t mean that the conversation is positive. In last year’s Year in News, we found that political opponents were the most likely to mention a political leader on Twitter. We believe that the best way to solve for the vexing problem of sentiment analysis in politics is to measure conversation levels amongst natural groups of supporters and opponents, as we do in Optimized Listening.

Looking at this weekly breakdown also underscores just how little different groups agree on what the agenda should be, never mind the right way to think about an issue. On just two weeks of the fifty so far this year have all groups — the general U.S. Twitter population, the media, liberals, and conservatives — agreed on the #1 story: the week of Ted Cruz’s announcement and the Pope’s visit. (Without Trump, it’s three.) Very often, we see how one event sparks a follow-up conversation, or a series of follow-up conversations that differ across groups. We saw this with the Charleston shooting and the Confederate Flag, and also with the Paris attacks: liberals and the media emphasized the issue of refugees before talking about ISIS, while conservatives pivoted directly to ISIS.

All of this analysis is made possible through Optimized Listening, which identifies who’s driving the conversation across more than 100 political, policy, and business issues in real time. By crossing social conversation with cluster analysis of key audiences on Twitter, we automate the process of discovering the underlying political and policy dynamics that are shaping opinion, making social data truly actionable.