Social Media Week kicked off last week, Feb 13-17, in 12 cities around the world. We thought it would be interesting to analyze the conversations happening worldwide about SMW. Simple topic profiles were set up using SMW and SMW city specific hashtags and keywords. For the best comparison we didn’t include company or non-SMW specific hashtags as they weren’t used in every city.

The conversation exploded this year with 78% more social mentions than SMW11.   The peak hour was Monday at 9 AM PST with 3,301 social posts.  This is when SMW kicked off in San Francisco and was already in full swing in other cities around the world including New York, Washington DC, Miami, Toronto, Sao Paulo, and London.  The peak hour continued to be around 7-9 AM PST every day for the rest of the week.  

People from all around the world posted about SMW. The U.S. lead the way, generating more than half of all SMW posts, while the UK, Canada, and Brazil rounded out the top 5. Unsurprisingly, 40% of the people who joined in on these conversations were in the 25-35 yrs old age demographic. 

In terms of cities, New York was the most mentioned, appearing in 21% of all posts. Outside of NY, 3 non-U.S. cities cracked the top 5. London was mentioned in 17%, Toronto was mentioned in 14%, and Sao Paulo was mentioned in 10% of posts. Sao Paulo may sound like a surprise, but Brazil is actually the 2^nd  largest nation of Twitter accounts according to Semiocast. 

Here’s the full list of top cities mentioned in SMW posts:

The one stat in the chart above I didn’t expect was so few mentions of San Francisco. It’s in the heart of Silicon Valley, and the technology capital of the world. Upon closer investigation however, it looks like many people posting from San Francisco were not using the #smwsf hashtag.  Instead, people used company specific hashtags such as #smwgoogle, #ebaysmw12, and #smwcisco. 

Using Klout we can also determine the top SMW influencers. @steffsez topped the list with influencing 1,048 posts. Here are the top 10 SMW influencers according to Klout:

Overall, it was a great week with lots of excitement and social media buzz.  You can find a more in-depth analysis in the deck posted below on Slideshare.