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The Tour de France of the one million tweets

This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)

The official hashtag of the Tour de France reaches 1,000,000 tweets

The organizers of the Tour de France 2017 used as its official hashtag #TDF2017 and it has overpassed the amount of one million tweets. This is an astonishing quantity. Tweet Binder has tracked the hashtag since the 1st of July until the 24th. Sports events always have great repercussion on Twitter and the Tour de France couldn’t be less. Users used different hashtags during the competition, that’s for sure, but we wanted to know if theses users tweeted with the official hashtag and how they did it.

The Tour de France social team should be very proud because users have been very active on the use of the official hashtag. During the 24 days of tracking 1,127,943 impressions were generated, this gives us 47,000 tweets per day. In this post we will learn how to read those data to make the most out of it. However, we can start by saying that this Tour de France 2017 has been a huge success on Social Media.

General data and type of tweets

It has to be noticed that 75% of the tweets are retweets, meaning that they are not original content. An original tweet is every tweet that is not a retweet.

Total number of Tweets 1,127,943
Original Tweets 280,056
Retweets 847,887
Users 242,914
Tweets per user 4,64
Original tweets per user 1,15
Tweets per day 46,997
Original tweets per day 11,669

Even though 11,669 original tweets per day is an absolutely incredible amount, we have to point out that there are 35,000 retweets to those tweets. This gives us a ratio of 3 retweets per day. To see who has lead the conversation on Twitter we should give a look to the most retweeted users:

User Retweets
@LeTour 206,720
@CarrefourFrance 61,245
@NairoQuinCo 29,578
@DansLaMusette 25,031
@TeamSky 18,395
@Movistar_Team 17,415
@opticiens_krys 13,505
@LeGruppetto 13,295
@jspocycle 12,870
@letour_col 12,531

Why this table is good for the Tour de France 2017 organizers? Firstly, because the tweets sent from the official Twitter handle @LeTour have obtained more than 200,000 retweets. Secondly because the teams and riders have been using the official hashtag as well: Nairo Quintana, Team Sky, etc. This means that the social team of the Tour de France has made a great job getting them to tweet with the official hashtag. This may seen easy or trivial but it is not, essentially when there are lots of other hashtags being used to refer to the race.

Most mentioned users

These are the most mentioned users on Twitter during the Tour de France 2017:

User Mentions
@LeTour 13,898
@chrisfroome 4,979
@petosagan 3,051
@TeamSky 2,563
@marcelkittel 2,246
@NairoQuinCo 2,120
@MarkCavendish 1,224
@francetvsport 1,221
@ArnaudDemare 985
@AG2RLMCyclisme 899

The official account of the Tour de France is the most mentioned one, not very surprising, but the next positions in the podium are for two riders: Chris Froome, winner of the Tour, and Peter Sagan disqualified for a dangerous move in the sprint finish appearing to elbow Mark Cavendish to the floor during the stage five. Here the moment:

The most mentioned users during the Tour de France where Peter Sagan and Mark Cavendish. But, once the elbow event was forgotten, other users made it to the ranking. However, both of them have stayed in the Top 10 until the end of the race.

The most mentioned team on Twitter was the Sky Team with more than 2,500 mentions. It is important to point out that these are mentions using the official hashtag #TDF2017. Finally, Marcel Kittle is the third most mentioned racer after a crash he suffered.

Most used languages

French and English are in the top positions of the most used languages on Twitter during the Tour of France 2017:

Language Tweets
French 427,603
English 348,566
Spanish 193,614
Japanese 37,007
Undetermined 31,285
Dutch 28,593
Italian 14,434
German 13,777
Polish 5,892
Portuguese 4,648

Most tweeted stage

It is very common that the last stage of the Tour de France is the most tweets because is the last one and because it used to make balance of the whole race. 2017 has not been an exception here. During this last stage 97,000 were sent. Without considering this last stage, the most mentioned one was on the 9th of July between Nantua and Chambéry with 87,500 tweets. Anyway, the last stage had more than 80,000 retweets so it is safe to say that the most tweeted stage was on the 9th of July because users sent more original content. But anyone is free to jump to other conclusions. Here is a mountain lookalike activity chart with all the stages: