5 Social Media News Stories You Need to Read This Week
By Yasmin PierreSep 29
Online Trends
Published October 30th 2018
#HauntedTwitter: The Most Haunted States in America
The Brandwatch React team loves Halloween.
We’ve studied creepy clowns. We’ve studied alien sightings. We’ve studied the times of day ghosties are most likely to appear.
But never before have we successfully found the most haunted state in America.
So, we worked with our friends at Twitter to analyze and visualize this year’s spooky data.
Let’s get spooky 👻
We’ll start with some facts.
According to our research, which incorporated around 5,000 tweets posted between 1 September 2017 and 26 September 2018, it’s more common for someone to say that somewhere is haunted than to explicitly say they’ve seen a ghost.
We found that women were more likely to talk about hauntings, while men were more likely to talk about seeing a ghost.
Where to avoid if you don’t like haunted places
In order to find the most haunted states we created a scoring system for each one to show just how haunted they are.
This was based on the number of ghost sightings or claims that a house/room/hall/school is haunted on Twitter and normalized based on the population of the state. This effectively showed how many sightings there were per person.
We removed spikes driven by people watching and liking YouTube videos (as many YouTube videos were titled something like “my house is haunted”) and we also removed retweets so each mention was an individual discussing a haunting or ghost sighting.
Here are the most haunted states.
Watch out for North Dakota – it’s spooky to the max.
Where to go if you don’t like haunted places
And, since we were there, we found the least haunted states too.
If you’re easily spooked and looking to move to a new place, consider the following locations.
The most haunted states in America, mapped
Here’s a nice map of the USA helpfully color-coded with our spookiness score, based on tweeted ghost and haunting reports.
Who you gonna call?
We’d love to hear your ghost stories – share them with us using #HauntedTwitter 👻
If you’d like to do your own analysis using social media data, you can give us a call to schedule a demo where our experts can take you through all the possibilities.
In the meantime, check out our report on 25 questions that can be answered using Twitter data on a whole bunch of different topics:
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