#TheYearInNews 2015 Echelon Insights Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 15, 2015 Social media conversation is an amazing window into the world of news. Not only are we able to use it to quantify the level of conversation around any story or topic — and thus get a directional sense of broader public interest— but we’re able to understand how stories move amongst certain audiences, and who talked the most about what. Today, we’re presenting our second annual Year In News, summarizing all U.S. Twitter conversation about the biggest stories of 2015. Powered by the Optimized Listening social analytics platform, we analyzed an estimated 459.9 million Twitter mentions across more than 150 trending topics and issues. To give you a sense of which stories moved where, we also broke down the conversation by week and for the year amongst three key audiences: the influential Beltway elites (as measured by a network analysis, described here), and samples of conservative and liberal activists on Twitter.

Excluding perennial subjects of conversation — like President Obama (who received 55 million mentions), and the Republican and Democratic parties, the most discussed person or issue in the news this year was Donald Trump, with 43 million U.S. mentions, followed by Hillary Clinton, with 31.5 million. Here’s the top 10: Donald Trump: 43.0 million Hillary Clinton: 31.5 million Iraq & ISIS: 24.0 million Bernie Sanders: 19.2 million #BlackLivesMatter: 15.0 million Iran: 14.8 million Freddie Gray: 13.1 million Jeb Bush: 12.5 million Guns: 11.8 million Abortion & Planned Parenthood: 11.2 million A list like this tends to show us issues that were popular throughout the year, with issues that accumulate mentions over time. But what were the highest spikes? Which stories shocked — or moved — us the most? The leader here is the Paris attacks, which saw 8.9 million U.S. tweets in the days following the attacks. Here are the top 5, ranked by mentions during the weeks the story dominated the news cycle: The Paris attacks, Nov. 8–15: 8.9 million Freddie Gray & Baltimore, Apr. 26-May 3: 7.1 million Donald Trump & Muslim immigration, Dec. 6: 5.0 million The Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage nationwide, Jun. 21: 4.9 million The Charleston shooting, Jun. 14: 3.2 million Breaking out volume across all topics by day also makes these peaks stand out even more, and reinforces for us just how rare it is for a story to truly stand out, and also how important televised events, like the debates of the State of the Union, are in driving conversation and ultimately opinion:

From late July forward, Donald Trump dominated the vast majority of news cycles on Twitter, losing the title of most-mentioned for just a handful of weeks across all audiences. We were wondering what 2015 would have looked like if he hadn’t decided to run. What stories or issues would have dominated our attention instead? So, we re-built our chart showing the #1 story by week across audiences without Trump. Here’s what it looks like: