Digital

Twitter Was Feeling the Grammys All Week

By Karen Fratti 

Kendrick Lamar may have been shut out of the biggest Grammy award Monday night, but his volcanic live performance sparked far and away the night’s biggest emotional reaction on Twitter, according to Nielsen data analyzed by Canvs. Even winning only five Grammys of his 11 nominations, Lamar was easily the night’s biggest source of reactions.

The Grammys have typically been one of the biggest nights of the year for Twitter, trailing only mega events such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars. It’s hardly surprising, given the intense connections music fans have with their favorite acts, and the huge followings many stars have on Twitter.

Monday night was no exception, with more than 7.6 million tweets during the CBS telecast. Of those tweets, Canvs detected nearly 2.7 million specific emotional reactions in the posts. Here are the biggest emotional moments of the night.

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Kendrick Lamar’s live, highly political performance of  a “To Pimp a Butterfly” medley that segued into a new song, sparked the night’s most emotional reactions, 85,127 in all. Half of them were in the “love” category and another 15 percent “crazy.” Even the run-up to his performance sparked more than 2,600 “Excited” reactions on Twitter.

Lamar also attracted a spike of “Love” and “Congrats” after he won the Best Rap album early in the show, the biggest of the five Grammys (out of 11 nominations) that he would win on the night. All told, nearly 8,800 of those reactions rained down on Twitter after the win for “Butterfly.”

Adele, despite a microphone mishap that knocked her piano out of tune, can apparently do no wrong with fans, grabbing the second-largest number of reactions of the night— nearly 73,000, with 44 percent of those expressing “love” for the reigning pop queen.

Adele later amusingly explained the tuning issue, which had caused about one in six fans commenting on the performance to express “dislike.” In a second tweet, Adele said she was treating herself to an In-N-Out burger.

Fans loved the look of the ridiculously attractive country singers Sam Hunt and Carrie Underwood onstage together. As for the actual music, well…

The Beliebers were out in force, as Justin Bieber picked up his first Grammy, for a collaboration with Diplo and Skrillex. The big spike, though, came when a Bieber fan site posted a video on Twitter of the pint-sized heartthrob and his much younger brother fooling around on the red carpet. More than 7,300 “Beautiful” reactions to Bieber spiked early in the broadcast once the tweet featuring the video hit.

Fans were sharply split when Taylor Swift won “Album of the Year,” with more than 47,000 specific emotional reactions. Some 24 percent expressed “Love” reactions over Swift’s win, and another 16 percent expressed a combination of “Love” and “Congrats.” But 28 percent expressed “Dislike” when Swift used her acceptance speech to subtly rebuke Kanye West for a misogynistic lyric directed at her in his song “Famous.”

West may not have been onstage (Lamar’s Grammy wins were mostly over West’s projects), but West stirred more reactions than anyone but Lamar. “Kanye” appeared in 3.5 percent of the 2.7 million tweets that expressed reactions — more than 93,000 in all.

Lady Gaga’s chameleonic tribute to the equally chameleonic David Bowie drew a massive “love” response from fans, another high-profile performance by her coming a week after singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl. In all, more than 25,000 tweets with “love” reactions spiked after Gaga’s performance, third only behind Lamar and Adele for the night.

Overall, the Grammy’s have been on everyone’s social accounts all week. This was a guest post from Canvs.

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