Analysis of XX Commonwealth Games Host Broadcast Coverage, Online Media and Official Digital Channels

2. Method

2.1 Three methods were employed to analyse the data available around broadcast media coverage, the Glasgow 2014 website and social media for this report.

2.2 Firstly, a content analysis of the material provided as part of the XX Commonwealth Games Transfer of Knowledge was undertaken. This focused on an analysis of content regarding right holding broadcast coverage, Glasgow 2014 website and YouTube. This was supplemented with information provided by Ofcom on media consumption around the Games in the UK.

2.3 Secondly, a further analysis of the Glasgow 2014 website was undertaken using Google Analytics covering the number of pages viewed, users per session, location of users and social media referrals for the period of the Games (23 July to 3 August 2014).

2.4 Thirdly, social media analysis was undertaken across the period of 14 June to 6 August using a commercially available social media analytics platform^[i]. This analysis covered message volumes, key word analysis, top hash tags and linked media, top authors and top tweets by retweets. This analysis was based on a retrospective look at the feed of tweets sent (known as the 'Firehose') for a set of Commonwealth Games terms^[ii] and publically available social media (from Facebook), online news and online video content. Analysis was limited to English language search terms. Data for these search terms were cleaned to remove unrelated content. However, due to the volume of data it is possible that some unrelated content may remain in the dataset. Analysis of content was undertaken in the social media analytics platform and is summarised in this report.

2.5 Additional social media analysis was undertaken in NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software package, in order to generate a word cloud of social media content for the period of 14 July to 6 August 2016. Context was provided using information from Facebook and Twitter's 'Review of the Year' on what was trending over 2014.

2.6 The time period of 14 June to 6 August 2014 was chosen as this was the period between the Queen's Baton arriving back in Scotland with the Scottish Relay leg starting on 14 June 2014 and the Athletes' Village closing to athletes on 6 August 2014. Social media messages were examined across the whole year of 2014 but as can be seen in Figure 2.1 below the vast majority of the posts occurred during 14 June to 6 August 2014 so the analysis in this report focuses on this period.

Figure 2.1. Commonwealth Games related social media trend over time between 14 June and 6 August 2014