#Piggate prompts 117,300 pieces of social content as wave of creativity greets David Cameron allegations
The David Cameron #piggate allegations sent Twitter into a creative frenzy with over 117,000 pieces of content being generated, according to digital agency Bloom.
The allegations contained within the unauthorised autobiography titled “Call Me Dave”, written by Lord Michael Ashcroft and serialised by the Daily Mail, has led to Twitter users and brands piggybacking on the trend with their own images and puns.
Unsurprisingly #piggate has become a viral sensation and Bloom used its social intelligence tool, Whisper, to count the number of tweets related to the topic.
The result is 117,300 pieces of comedy centred on #piggate. One of the most significant aspects of the findings yielded by Whisper is the number of people creating their own content rather than retweeting someone else. Bloom say that this has resulted in content spreading across online communities far quicker.
Notice how in this picture David Cameron isn't wearing his wedding ring. Suspicious... pic.twitter.com/ZfHcYfrOem
— Ryan Shields (@BarackObadyin) September 20, 2015
Twitter first became party to the story at 10:23pm last night when BBC journalist Nick Sutton tweeted:
Highlights from Mail serialisation of @LordAshcroft & @IsabelOakeshott's book on David Cameron #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/yx99PkaWNY — Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) September 20, 2015In the proceeding hours the hashtag #piggate went viral and positioned itself atop Twitter’s trending topics. Bloom’s Whisper tool revealed that between 10pm last night and 10am this morning there were 250,000 tweets about #piggate with people in the conversation tweeting an average 2.9 times on the subject. Taken in the context of highly engaged periods of Twitter audience participation, people tweet on average 1.8 times during the X Factor.
The conversation peaked just after midnight with 1,000 tweets per minute being posted before dying down throughout the before picking up momentum again after 6am this morning.
The spread of the conversation is largely down to how Twitter has responded to the story by adding their own take on the story. In this 12-hour period 22,408 unique pieces of content have been retweeted which according to Whisper is far higher than usual.