The Changing Nature of Viewership: Formality of Social Media Conversations

We research second screen interactions that form a social soundtrack concerning a major broadcast media event by performing statistical analysis on more than 3,000,000, 800,000 and 50,000 social media posts from three social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr) concerning Super Bowl XLIX for three categories (commercials, musicals and game) during three phrases (Pre, During, and Post). We identify significant differences in formality among phases and categories across platforms and classify the predominant phase and category by formality across the three social networks. For formality analysis, we identify musicals as dominant category on Twitter, commercials and musicals categories as dominant on Tumblr, and game as the dominant category on Instagram this event. The formality analysis over phases shows that the Post phase is dominant for commercial and game categories on Twitter, while no phase is dominant for musicals. The During phase is predominant on Tumblr. Interestingly, the Pre phase shows formality predominance for commercials and musicals, while the Post phase is more formal for game social media conversations.