A Close Look at Apple's Latest Astonishing Twitter Takeover

For this week's Trendrr charticle -- a collaboration between Advertising Age and social-media tracking service Trendrr Pro -- I decided to flash back to that distant, hazy time in early September, before the Labor Day weekend. Specifically, last Wednesday, when Apple's CEO made all kinds of new-product announcements, including the launch of Ping, its iTunes-based social network. Steve Jobs, when he's talking up product, is perhaps second only to teen pop star Justin Bieber in his ability to electrify Twitter -- and so using the spanking new data-analysis tools the gang at Trendrr has been rolling out in what they're calling Trendrr v3, I decided to take a closer look at Apple's rather breathtaking footprint on Twitter last Wednesday.

Sentiment analysis of Apple-related tweets.

For now, Apple:

• When all the relevant terms (e.g., Apple, #apple, Steve Jobs, iTunes, etc.) are rolled up, more than 2 million tweets were Apple-related last Wednesday.
• The top five countries: the U.S. (42% of tweet volume about Apple last Wednesday), Japan (11%), the U.K. (9%), Canada (6%) and Brazil (4%).
• In the U.S., the city that issued the most Apple-related tweets last Wednesday was New York.

Gender breakdown of those tweeting about Apple.
• The most influential Twitterers tweeting about Apple last Wednesday (i.e., those most retweeted) were, predictably, the tech blogs, including Gizmodo, TechCrunch and Mashable.
• The most shared and clicked links -- also predictably -- were those that facilitated live viewing of Steve Jobs' presentation, most notably Ustream's feed, and those that offered "live-blog" coverage of the event, most notably live.gizmodo.com.
• Trendrr v3's real-time sentiment meter -- which uses machine logic and linguistic analysis to gauge the general mood of tweets surrounding a specific topic -- hovered heavily positive about Apple throughout the day at 60%. The 17% negative reading is misleadingly high; the majority of gripes had to do with problems viewing the live stream of the event.
• Your average Twitter-happy Apple fanboy really is ... a boy. Per Trendrr v3's estimate, three out of four tweets about Apple during Steve Jobs' presentation last Wednesday came from males. Since then, Apple fangirls stepped up their tweeting a bit, but not by much, with a cumulative gender ratio of 62% male/38% female.

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Dumenco's Trendrr Chart of the Week is produced in collaboration with Wiredset, the New York digital agency behind Trendrr, a social- and digital-media tracking service, and Curatorr, a social media filtering and publishing platform. More background here. Trendrr offers a free trial account; Trendrr Pro, which offers more robust tracking and reporting tools, comes in various paid flavors (get the details here).

Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.