KCON 2015 Is a Trending Topic on Twitter
A study showed that K-pop fans from around the globe tweeted about their favorite bands and artists during KCON 2015, which ran from July 31 to August 2. According to Korea Creative Content Agency's (KOCCA) L.A. branch, there were over 916,000 tweets from July 27 to August 9 about the annual convention.
The data was taken from the research conducted with Kim Seon-ho, a research scientist - who specializes in multimedia systems, GIS, mobile video management and spatial database - at the University of South California.
The most number of tweets came from the United States West Coast. Plenty of posts also came from the East Coast, Beijing, Bangkok and Jakarta. The study discovered that fans from over 200 cities tweeted about KCON.
Among all the K-pop artists, GOT7 was the hottest topic. This could be because one of the members - BamBam - is Thai. Next on the list of trending topics were Super Junior, Girls' Generation and Crush.
The results also showed that a lot of the tweets were positive messages, containing words like "beautiful", "love", "laugh" and "like", among others. On the other hand, there were few tweets on beauty products, food and Korean dramas despite South Korea's attempts to promote its entire culture other than K-pop.
To this, Kim Il-jung said, "It's worth considering why most hallyu fans consider KCON a K-pop event". According to the head of KOCCA's L.A. branch, the convention should feature various things to establish that it's comprehensive and that it includes "All Things Hallyu", as indicated on its logo.
KCON started in 2012 and, since then, has been held in the U.S. Its organizers include Mnet Media, Koreaboo, CJ E&M and Powerhouse Live. Its headquarters is in Southern California, but it expanded to Japan and the East Coast this year.
